BEIRUT – The leader of Lebanon's Hizbollah said on Saturday the group was not connected to the Al Qaeda network, blamed for the Sept. 11 attacks.
ìThere is no relationship with Al Qaeda – not previously and not now – and not for religious or ideological reasons but for political reasons,î Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah told the Arabic satellite television channel MBC.
ìThe issue is linked to the political programme and the battle priorities,î he said, without elaborating.
US Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Bob Graham called Hizbollah the ìA-Team of terroristsî earlier this week after returning from a regional tour to gather information for the investigation into the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington.
Senators who accompanied Graham to Lebanon and Syria alluded to resistance camps in Lebanon's Palestinian refugee camps and the Bekaa Valley, and said a lesson of Sept. 11 was that Washington was slow to deal with such camps in Afghanistan. Palestinian refugees have been living in Lebanon since 1948 when Israel was created on their homeland and have not been allowed to return ever since.
The senators' remarks came during speculation about the next military target in the US ìanti-terror warî and followed a series of US media reports of links between Hizbollah and Al Qaeda militants.
Hizbollah is a Lebanese resistance group whose war of attrition drove Israel from south Lebanon in 2000 after a 22-year occupation. Al Qaeda belongs to the larger Sunni sect of Islam.
Nasrallah said he was not opposed to working with Sunni groups, saying Hizbollah has relationships with Palestinian Sunni groups. But he said the United States had no evidence to link Hizbollah with Al Qaeda.
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