BEIRUT (Dispatches) –
Lebanese security forces have arrested a journalist on charges of spying for the Zionist regime’s Mossad spy agency and collaboration with the regime’s authorities through writing defamatory articles about the Hezbollah and turning the public opinion against the resistance movement.
Lebanon’s Arabic-language al-Akhbar daily newspaper, citing judicial sources, reported that the Lebanese journalist wrote “dozens” of anti-Hezbollah pieces at the request of the Zionist regime, receiving between $300 and $700 per article.
The news platform the journalist was writing for, according to the report, was al-Jaras magazine.
The journalist was also told to draw connections between Hezbollah and the massive August 4, 2020 explosion at the port of Beirut, which killed more than 200 people and wounded 6,500 others.
He crafted false evidence in his pieces, and faulty analyses designed to implicate Hezbollah in the devastating blast, and pit ordinary Lebanese people against the resistance movement.
The judicial sources said that the suspect was asked if he knew he was working for the Zionist regime, when he wrote the anti-Hezbollah pieces.
The report said that despite claiming he was unaware and doubtful that his ’employers’ were linked to the occupying regime, the spy continued to write the pieces out of financial advantages.
The Lebanese al-Manar television network identified the journalist as Mohammed Shoaib, saying he saw an advertisement for a foreign company on a website and then contacted the firm.
The company offered him a monthly salary in exchange for writing a number of articles a month.
Al-Manar added it did not take long before Shoaib was contacted by a Zionist man named Tom. Tom asked the Lebanese journalist to report on political issues.
The pieces were asked to be in the interest of Persian Gulf Arab states, drawing on a hostile language against Hezbollah and Palestinian Hamas resistance movements.
According to informed sources, Tom not only specified the titles and political topics of the articles for Shoaib, but also asked the Lebanese journalist to publish his pieces on a number of websites, including Alkalima online and Lebanon 24.
Last month, the al-Akhbar newspaper reported that the country’s security forces had uncovered at least 17 Zionist spy networks.