Report: Hezbollah has 300 operatives in NYC

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A recent report by the House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security states that there are hundreds, perhaps even thousands, people he described as "Iranian and Hezbollah terrorists" in the United States.

An alarming part of the officials' assessments focuses on the apparent surveillance missions that Iranian diplomats and possible Hezbollah operatives have been seen conducting at sensitive targets such as New York City's subways and bridges, and at nuclear power plants and tunnels elsewhere in the United States in the past 10 years.

At the same time, US officials caution that Hezbollah, a Shiite militia based in Lebanon, has largely avoided attacking US targets since it carried out mass-casualty bombings in the 1980s against the US Embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut. One reason may be that it does not want to endanger its lucrative North American fund-raising operations.

A law enforcement official said that the New York Police Department, whose monitoring of Muslim communities has prompted political controversy, believes that between 200 and 300 Hezbollah sympathizers live in New York City. Between 10 and 20 of those are relatives of Hezbollah leaders or fighters who were killed in action, said the official.

The NYPD's knowledge of Hezbollah's infrastructure is sufficiently detailed that it has identified three Lebanese towns, Bint Jbeil, Yanoun and Yatar, to which suspected sympathizers of the group have ties. At least a handful of people in New York connected with Hezbollah have also undergone military training in Lebanon, the official said.

A preliminary Homeland Security report said that pinpointing the number of Hezbollah operatives inside the United States was difficult because of the group's operational security. The report nonetheless cited the estimates of "some officials" that the group "likely" has "several thousand sympathetic donors" in the United States as well as "hundreds" of operatives.

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