Tunisia reveals more details of Mohammad Zawari’s assassination

Tunisia’s Interior Ministry confirmed on Tuesday that the two main assassins of engineer Mohammad Zawari were Bosnians who entered the country through the port of Halq Al-Wadi on 8 December, 2016, Quds Press has reported.

A ministry spokesman told journalists that there were several others involved in the assassination, including one man called Christophe, apparently an Austrian. “He presented himself as being interested in Zawari’s inventions,” he explained, “especially remote control for submarines.”

The spokesman added that the Tunisian authorities have sent arrest warrants to their Bosnian, Swedish, Belgian, Turkish, Cuban, Egyptian, Lebanese and Croatian counterparts to extradite suspects in Zawari’s killing.

With the investigation still ongoing, although the ministry revealed photographs and names of the assassins, the spokesman said that it did not reveal all of the details. Nevertheless, it showed that the killers used several kinds of vehicles and hired local people who were unaware of being used in the assassination.

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Preparations for the assassination began in 2015 and took place outside Tunisia, in Eastern Europe and New York. Zawari apparently had a smart phone from Turkey which had been hacked, and his killers followed him up through a GPS app. “They were highly professional,” said the spokesman, who added that a “huge” amount of money appears to have been spent on the operation.

In November last year the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, accused the Israeli Mossad spy agency of being responsible for the assassination. It claimed that the main suspects held [presumably fake] Bosnian passports and arrived in Tunisia through Tunis Carthage International Airport.

Zawari was born in 1967 and was a member of the Hamas military wing, Al-Qassam Brigades. He was one of the engineers who developed drones which were used by the Brigades during the 2014 Israeli military offensive against the Palestinians in Gaza.

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