After an emergency meeting with Mossad commander David Bernea, the head of the Israeli National Security Council (NSC) made an unusual statement, even by the standards of those familiar with terrorist The Israeli threat is an announcement. “Lock yourself in your hotel rooms and don’t even open them to cleaning ladies,” the Council warned about 2,000 Israeli tourists in Istanbul. “Don’t post on social media. Do not visit popular tourist attractions. Don’t take a taxi.”

It was the afternoon of June 17, 2022. The Mossad and Turkish MIT received information about an imminent terrorist attack by Iran against Israelis visiting Istanbul. The Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz said in its report that one of the attack scenarios involved the Iranians invading the central hotel to kill Israelis, and the second involving the kidnapping of tourists by Iranian-recruited Turkish terrorists who, under false pretenses, approached visitors from Israel. . According to one version, the attack plan was a response to the assassination three weeks earlier of Revolutionary Guard Colonel Sayad Hodai in the Iranian capital. He was executed by five bullets in his car by two gunmen who approached him and fled on motorcycles. According to international press reports, Khodai was the deputy commander of the 840 Group tasked with carrying out terrorist attacks against Israeli and Western targets outside of Iran. The regime in Tehran blamed Israel for the murder of Hodai and wanted revenge.

What happened in those days in the streets of Kapali Charsi, Istanbul’s covered market, and led to the arrest of five Iranian terrorist suspects, put the intelligence services of the southeastern Mediterranean on high alert. They served as the starting point for an investigation, first by the National Intelligence Service and then by the Anti-Terrorism Service, which culminated a few months later in the arrest of two Pakistani citizens for their part in a plan to attack the synagogue, a Jewish restaurant in Psirri.

Two young people have been in the country illegally for the past 4-5 years and have been working on the land as earthworkers, the first in Zakynthos and the second in Sparta. Since November 2022 (four months after the events in Istanbul), they have been in contact with a compatriot living in Iran, who allegedly offered them to attack the Shabab house in Psirri in exchange for a monetary reward. All three were Shiite Muslims from the same village in Pakistan.

Murders in Tehran and actions to revitalize Pakistani Shiites.

According to the official version, the EMP and the intelligence agencies collaborating with it, including the Israeli Mossad, alarmed by the attempts of terrorist attacks against Israeli targets by suspects associated, according to Western sources of information, with the Tehran regime, decided to increase the level of combat readiness. objects representing the interests of Israel. “We have been alerted by assessing the targets and increasing our interest in the Muslim communities in the country who may be in contact with Iran,” said K. The same source said that at the initial stage of the investigation, between August 2022 and during over the next 3-4 months, EEM representatives recorded suspicious movements of people near possible targets of attacks, informing the Israeli authorities about this.

According to what became known and recorded in the file of the Anti-Terrorism Directorate, the first negotiations between the suspects in Iran and Athens were recorded in November 2022, and in January 2023 it became known that their goal was an attack on a Jewish restaurant – a synagogue on Ezopou Street, in Psyri. “Two or three people go there and set fire to the kitchen whenever possible,” is a revealing message shared by the two defendants via the WhatsApp app. “It will happen, I promise you, and I will send you photos and videos of each victim.”

Since the Christmas period, EEM officials have begun to record the trips of one of the two arrested from Laganas Zakynthos, where he lived with his compatriots, to Athens and back. When they were convinced that he was observing, photographing and filming Shabab’s house in Psirri, they reported this to the Anti-Terrorism Directorate. He was brought in, along with the rest of his roommates, and was initially detained for administrative removal, as it was established that he was living in the country illegally. Leaders of EL.AS. they took his mobile phone and extracted from applications such as WhatsApp, Viber, and messages and messages from his social media accounts. His ties surfaced with a Pakistani mastermind in Iran who promised a reward if the attack went ahead, and with a second arrest who allegedly took part in surveillance of a Jewish restaurant. Their efforts to secure the means to carry out a terrorist attack or to recruit hardened criminals capable of carrying out an elimination mission until their arrest for terrorism fails.

Terrorist attacks that were prevented in Cyprus

Mossad and EYP’s reflexes have been heightened by yet another planned attack against an Israeli target in the southeastern Mediterranean. It was in October 2021 that it turned out that a 40-year-old Azerbaijani named Orkhan Asadov and 5 of his accomplices, most of whom are from Pakistan, acting on orders from Tehran, tried to kill Israeli businessmen living and working in Cyprus. . Among them was, according to The Jerusalem Post, Israeli multimillionaire Teddy Sagi, who dominated the Greek and international media with his purchase of a luxury villa in Mykonos and his relationships with famous fashion models such as Bar Refaeli.

“Between April and September 2021, the defendants conspired to commit murders of Israeli citizens permanently residing in the Republic of Cyprus,” official court documents in the case say. The plan was seen by Western security services as an attempt by Tehran to respond to the November 2020 assassination of Iranian nuclear scientist and “father” of the country’s nuclear program, Mosen Fakhrizadeh, outside Tehran. “The criminal element in all of this is the Zionist regime and the Mossad,” a senior Tehran official said of the assassination.

During months of interrogation in the Cyprus case, most of those arrested were cleared of charges. Asadov, who testified that he received 40,000 euros from an Arab man named “Mohammed” to find Israeli businessmen, and a Pakistani citizen named Muzaffar Abbas, 27, who worked as a delivery man for a fast food chain in Cyprus, remain in prison. in custody to this day. The latter claimed to have been recruited by a Syrian who told him that “my friend from Russia is in Cyprus and needs help to find a target and kill him.” It is alleged that she sent him via WhatsApp the coordinates of the place, asking him if he knew the place and if he could find it. According to Cypriot press reports, the 27-year-old delivery man was linked to the Liwa Zainebiyoun organization, a paramilitary group made up of Pakistani Shiites operating in Syria. They also show that photographs and visual materials with symbols of the Shiite organization Hezbollah were found in the mobile phones of the remaining Pakistanis. The trial in this particular case is scheduled for July.