IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE SALEH AL-AROURI ASSASSINATION, SHOULD MALTA BE WORRIED?

 

Palestinian Islamic Jihad founder FATHI SHAQAQI 

The year is 1995; Fathi Shaqaqi, the founder and "Secretary-General" of the violent Islamic terrorist organization, PALESTINIAN ISLAMIC JIHAD (PIJ), having flown in from a private meeting with Libya's Moammar Gaddafi, wherein he had requested funding, is leaving his hotel in Sliema, Malta. He is assassinated by agents of Israel's foreign intelligence service. Fast forward to the present day, January 2024, and the scene is Beirut, and the  drone attack upon the Hamas office there, resulting in the death of Hamas' second in command,  SALEH AL-AROURI, known to have supported terrorist attacks in the West Bank.

The October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks upon Israeli civilians have spawned what amount to a government campaign of revenge, not only upon Hamas inside Gaza, but against its corrupt leadership, living abroad in what they believe to be safe harbors in the Middle East. Described to the press by the name Operation Nili, it is an officially-sanctioned program of assassination of Hamas senior leadership, wherever they may happen to be. 

The cabinet set a goal for us to take out Hamas. And we are determined to do it. In every location, in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Turkey, and Qatar, everyone. It will take a few years, but we will do it.

SHIN BET DIRECTOR, RONEN BAR

Why should Malta's citizens be concerned? Pro-Palestine Malta, an EU Member state, with a diplomatic relationship to the Palestinian Authority, has been one of the primary terrorist funding sources for  a number of sanctioned terrorist organizations, especially Hamas and the PIJ, for several years. Working among Palestinian expats, and focusing especially upon cyber currency, Malta has been a key player in providing material supports to designated Palestinian terrorist organizations. 

By all indications, the dark days of assassinations of Palestinian terrorist leaders who are responsible for ordering their subordinates to commit war crimes, and crimes against humanity, are back, as an instrument of national policy. Although Europe may be off limits now to attacks such as were undertaken in the 1970s, most Hamas and PIJ leaders are currently living in the Middle East; and Old Testament-style retribution could to be in the cards for the guilty.

Will history repeat itself?

However, this is now the modern era, when Follow the Money as a solution is as much a part of dismantling terrorist organizations as arresting or eliminating its leaders. Our Maltese financial services friends should therefore expect to see not only investigations, by foreign intelligence and law enforcement agencies, but forceful action, which could include major sanctions, seizures, blocking of access to the US financial structure, and even the criminal indictments which the compliance world has long wished upon Malta's career money launderers and dirty banks, but this time for their fatal acts of terrorist financing.

Malta may have the European Union's worst record on violent acts, like bombings, but it may be in store for far more impactful, and damaging, responses to the terrorist financing activities in support of Hamas and PIJ conducted by its residents and their financial entities; Watch for it.