This is how Army Intelligence dismantled the “Kaftun Cell”

Radwan Mortada –

Just before midnight yesterday, army intelligence managed to re-arrest the suspect, Abd al-Razzaq al-Raz, a member of the “Kaftoun Cell”, in one of the Denniyeh forests, with a bullet in his back. The latter was arrested outside the building where he lives in the Beddawi area the day before yesterday, but managed to flee after the forces of the force were attacked and four of them died.

Yesterday, Army Intelligence intensified the search for the suspect, Ahmed Al-Shami, the last remaining members of the cell.

The rice raid on Sunday night was based on testimony from one of the detainees that al-Shami and the mastermind of the Khaled al-Talawi cell (detained for two years on terrorism charges and released in 2017) they contacted a merchant in Beddawi, asking for the clothes and asking for the rice to secure them. Consequently, the investigator asked the Army Intelligence Office to send a patrol to Al-Beddawi to bring the rice, which was parked in front of the building where he lived with his wife and two children.

The patrol included six members, four of them, accompanied by the arrested man, went to search his apartment, in which Al-Talawi and Al-Shami were hiding, without the security services having information about it. Al-Riz opened the door of the house and entered the apartment accompanied by three officers. Al-Talawi and al-Shami engaged them by throwing two grenades and firing at the assault force. Three of them died at the scene and the fourth was seriously injured and soon died. A woman and her son, residents of the building, were also injured, as well as a gunshot in the back. The three managed to exit the building through another building before seizing a car after threatening its driver with a gun and driving him in the direction of Denniyeh. Upon arrival at the checkpoint in the city of Ashash, the driver failed to comply with the checkpoint signal to stop, so the checkpoint officers pushed the iron fork in front of the car, which had completed its way for about 500 meters before the suspects came out and hid in the woods.

Around 2 a.m., Al-Talawi came out of hiding for an unknown reason, and it is likely that he did so either to get first aid to help the rice or to steal a car to escape. Al-Talawi met a member of the army who asked him to stop. Al-Talawi replied that he was from the “intelligence service”, before firing a pistol in the direction of al-Askari. The bullet hit the military weapons store, which returned fire and killed al-Talawi.

The total of 13 people arrested and the last suspect is still unknown

How did the army get to the brain of Kaftoun’s cell, which committed a crime in which three people were killed in the Koranic city last month?
Al-Akhbar learned that the decoding of the Kaftoun crime was started from the car that was used in the crime. The search began to determine the owner of the current car, a Honda, after it was found to have been sold six times before reaching the last buyer, Bahjat Al-Talawi, Khaled’s brother. Investigations revealed that the latter was the one who used it most frequently, and that the perpetrators of Kaftun’s crime were four, including Al-Talawi and Al-Shami. While two of the detainees mentioned that Talawi was the leader of the group, the information indicated that he was a source of information and a direct link between Lebanon and the outside world.

The investigations led to the identification of two other suspects, Yusef Khalaf and Ahmed Al-Shami, as key participants in the Kaftoun crime. Al-Shami is still hidden from view.

Al-Akhbar learned that the total number of detainees was 13. As for the objectives of this cell, they were numerous, among them hitting the army and causing trouble to shake civil peace, after having agreed to finance its operations with acts Of robbery. What is striking about the testimonies of the detainees is that they stole electrical cables and goods for a few hundred thousand pounds.