Local Editor

Al-Akhbar Lebanese daily revealed Tuesday that investigations with Omar al-Atrash faced a great difficulty in the first two days, before the latter started providing very serious information.

According to the daily sources, al-Atrash admitted that his role was limited to the transfer of people or vehicles from Arsal to Beirut. "I used to hand them to people who knew how to behave later."
He further admitted planning to expand his terrorist activity in Beirut's Dahiyeh and other parts of Lebanon.

In parallel, security sources informed al-Akhbar that al-Atrash confessed to his prior knowledge to attempts to expand the scope of bombings in Dahiyeh and other areas.

"Al-Atrash transported Lebanese, Syrian and Palestinian nationals" linked to the bombings plot, the sources said.
Moreover, he confessed that he had transferred 2 4x4 Grand Cherokee cars and a BMW X5 SUV to Beirut.

The cars were put in a warehouse at an unknown location in Dahiyeh's outskirts owned by a man called Abu Suleiman.

Al-Atrash revealed that he knew several current terror suspects in Lebanon and that the Palestinian Ibrahim Abou Moeleik was responsible, along with another Lebanese citizen currently being pursued, for planning a three-man operation in Dahiyeh.
The operation was going to include a machine gun attack carried out by suicide bombers who would have detonated their explosives before the arrival of a rigged car.

When people gathered around the bomb site the car would have been detonated.

The source clarified that al-Atrash had provided important information concerning a network transferring rigged cars from Syria to Lebanon via Arsal and that a Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut was used several times to transfer suicide bombers and rigged cars.

Al-Atrash is accused of helping suicide bombers cross from Syria to Lebanon, and being a member of the same group as Abou Moeleik, known as Abou Jaafar, who was killed by the Army on Thursday 23 January as they attempted to arrest him for involvement in a number of terrorist operations.

Abou Moeleik belonged to the Abdullah Azzam Brigades, and had close ties with the so-called "Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant" [ISIL].

Source: Al-Akhbar daily