The French Intelligence Online website revealed that Lebanon has recovered its citizen Qasim Taj Al-Din who was imprisoned in the United States on charges of financing the activities of the Lebanese Hezbollah after he was extradited to Morocco.
The website said that Tajuddin arrived in Beirut on the 18th of this month after his lawyers and the director of the Lebanese public security, Abbas Ibrahim, negotiated his release.
According to the website, Taj al-Din was released late last May formally on the pretext of fear of the Corona virus, but in reality the release - according to the site - was a trade-off for the American-Lebanese citizen Amer Fakhoury, the Israeli agent who was taken out of Beirut by helicopter that landed in the lobby of the American embassy Last March. At the time, the case raised great suspicion in Lebanon.
Petition request
Earlier, a federal judge in Washington on May 28 agreed to an urgent "resting" request by Qasim Tajuddin, because he had "serious health problems" that made him vulnerable to infection with the Corona Virus, two years before the end of his five-year prison sentence.
And American newspapers at the time quoted judicial documents stating that the reason for the release was due to Taj El Din’s suffering from a health crisis and the risk of developing corona.
In 2017, Moroccan authorities arrested Tajuddin, 64, under an international memorandum, and extradited him to the United States, eight years after his name was included in the list of international terrorists.
Taj El-Din then faced a five-year prison sentence, after his conviction for "pumping millions of dollars into the accounts of Lebanese Hezbollah, and crimes related to money laundering."
Lebanese Hezbollah is on the American "terrorism list", and it is classified as a "terrorist organization" in several western and Gulf countries.