Nasrallah rejects all charges against his group by Egypt

Apr 10, 2009, 18:56 GMT

Beirut - Lebanon's Hezbollah Secretary General Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah rejected on Friday all accusations by Egypt that his group was plotting attacks in Cairo.

'I fully reject and deny all charges that Hezbollah was intending to launch an act of aggression in Egypt or at any part of the world,' Nasrallah said in a speech on al-Manar Television.

'The Egyptian regime should be charged and condemned for besieging Gaza. The regime works day and night on destroying Gaza tunnels,' Nasrallah charged.

'If aiding the Palestinians is a crime, then I am guilty and proud of it,' he said.

His statement comes two days after Egyptian Public Prosecutor Abdel-Magid Mohammed accused Nasrallah of dispatching agents to Egypt during Israel's offensive in the Gaza Strip with the aim of recruiting local agents to conduct attacks, and to incite the people and the armed forces to revolt, to spy on Egypt and to smuggle weapons and cash to Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Nasrallah said the aim of these accusation is to 'agitate the Egyptian people and to defame Hezbollah's pure and bright image.

'Such accusations aim to only please the Americans and Israelis for the Egyptian regime has failed by all means,' he said, and declared it was a 'duty for Hezbollah' to help the Palestinians.

He stressed that Hezbollah is a purely Lebanese party from its leadership to its base and it has no branches anywhere else.

'Hezbollah does not intend to enter into any form of enmity and conflict with any Arab, Islamic or international regime in the world,' Nasrallah said.

He added that the charge of attempting to spread the Shiite way of thinking and practices is baseless.

'No single individual can do so in Egypt. To accuse us of being agents working for others is meaningless,' the Iranian-backed Hezbollah leader said.

Nasrallah admited that one of the arrested in Egypt, whom he identified by his first name as Sami, is a member of Hezbollah.

'We don't deny this our brother Sami was providing logistic help to the Palestinian resistance at the Egyptian-Palestinian borders (but) ... all other charges against him are false,' Nasrallah said.

Nasrallah, whose movement declared victory over Israel during its 33-day war in Lebanon in July, 2006 had urged Egyptians to act during Israel's onslaught against the Gaza Strip last December, urging the people and armed forces to compel their leaders to open the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt.

The statement drew a fierce response from Cairo at the time, with Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit telling Nasrallah, 'You are a man who used to enjoy respect, but you have insulted the Egyptian people.'

Egypt has rejected pressure to open its border to break the Israeli economic siege of Gaza, fearing that it might get saddled with responsibility for 1.5 million Palestinians.

Hezbollah and its leadership has not forgotten how Egypt criticized the movement for recklessness at the outset of the 2006 war.

Many Arab states, among them Egypt, have criticized the movement for igniting a war with Israel in July 2006, after its guerrillas snatched two Israeli soldiers during a cross-border raid. Israel retaliated with a wide-scale attack against Lebanon that killed 1,200, mostly Lebanese civilians.

Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan oppose Hezbollah and the Palestinian fundamentalist movement Hamas for its links with Shiite Iran, whose influence they view as a threat to the Mideast region.