Inquiry launched into ‘Hezbollah plot’ to kill Netanyahu’s French lawyer

A French judge has ordered an investigation into a reported plot by Lebanon's Hezbollah to assassinate a lawyer linked to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Lawyer Olivier Pardo told investigators that Ruddy Terranova visited his office in Paris on July 16 and informed him of the plan. Mr Terranova, who was convicted in 2004 of violence considered to be motivated by Islamist radicalism, said he had been approached by Hezbollah during a trip to Senegal.

After the meeting, the lawyer immediately filed a police report and an investigation was launched on July 28, the prosecutor's office told The National.

Mr Terranova warned Mr Pardo that, while he had refused Hezbollah's offer others may have accepted the job, according to daily newspaper Le Parisien, which broke the story.

Mr Pardo was reportedly targeted because he was one of Mr Netanyahu's lawyers before the International Criminal Court (ICC), which issued an arrest warrant against the Israeli leader last November.

Several factors indicate Mr Terranova's statements should be carefully considered, investigators say. That he made no attempt to blackmail Mr Pardo gives extra credibility to his statement, they added.

Mr Pardo, who counts a number of prominent politicians as his clients including French far-right figure Eric Zemmour, said he was "confident that the judiciary will determine whether this is a real or a phantom menace".

Le Parisien said Mr Terranova, a former gang member, was taken into custody in the week beginning July 21 in connection with the case. He served as a police informant and was later suspected of involvement in a plan to kill another lawyer, Karim Achoui, in 2007. He was acquitted of that charge.

Hezbollah, which operates as a political party and a paramilitary militia in Lebanon, is not known to have planned assassinations on French soil targeting prominent characters linked to Israel since the 1980s.

The group was significantly weakened by an Israeli bombing campaign last year that killed most of its mid-ranking and senior leadership. It is now under significant pressure to disarm.

Its close ally, Iran, is however suspected of being behind a number of killings and assassination attempts of Iranian dissidents living in Europe.

A French gangster, currently in detention in the Netherlands, is suspected by authorities to have been hired by Iran last year in a failed attempt to kill an Iranian journalist in the Dutch city of Haarlem.

On July 15, the European Union imposed sanctions on eight people and one entity for committing "extrajudicial, summary and arbitrary executions and killings, as well as enforced disappearances" of Iranian critics.