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Panamanian Trial Could Reveal Key Facts About Iran Terror Network Targeting Americans

Panamanian authorities have a 1994 bombing’s suspected Iranian-backed Hezbollah mastermind in custody, with a trial ensuing soon.

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For more than three decades, the mystery of who blew Alas Chiricanas Flight 901 out of the Panama sky, killing all 21 aboard, including 12 top Jewish businessmen and three U.S. citizens, remained unsolved and mostly forgotten by the outside world. The small commuter plane to Panama City exploded July 19, 1994, shortly after takeoff from Colon, leaving only one body in the wreckage, not positively identified for years: a Middle Eastern male thought to have carried the bomb aboard.

But now Panamanian authorities have the bombing’s suspected Iranian-backed Hezbollah mastermind in custody: Ali Zaki Hage Jalil, a 57-year-old Colombian-Venezuelan of Lebanese descent. A revelatory terrorism trial of the century is on the immediate horizon.

Judicial proceedings in Panama City promise to spotlight for Americans how Iran still fields clandestine networks in America’s backyard. These can target the large U.S. citizen expatriate population living in Central America and Mexico as well as thousands of regional American businesses.

After U.S.-Israel airstrikes killed his father, Iran’s new Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei wrote that his top strategic priority was to exact a blood “vengeance” on the United States and its leaders and that “freedom-seekers across the world [author’s emphasis] will each carry out part of this divine mission.”

Under pressure from a U.S. naval flotilla in November of last year, the FBI and Panama persuaded Maduro’s government to arrest Hage Jalil in the known Hezbollah enclave of Marguerita Island. In April, after Maduro was deposed, Venezuela extradited him to stand trial in Panama. Undoubtedly, Hage Jalil has remained plugged into the Iranian network on Marguerita Island and, with a successful trial, could fill actionable intelligence gaps about what Iran might be planning and how it operates.

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