Hezbollah denies links to Alqaeda

Hezbollah denies link to Al Qaeda

Beirut |Reuters | Gulf News14-07-2002

The leader of Lebanon's Hezbollah said yesterday the group was not connected to the Al Qaeda network, blamed for the September 11 attacks.

"There is no relationship with Al Qaeda - not previously and not now - and not for religious or ideological reasons but for political reasons," Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah told the Arabic satellite television channel MBC.

"The issue is linked to the political programme and the battle priorities," he said.

U.S. Senate Intelligence Commi-ttee chairman Bob Graham called Hezbollah the "A-team of terrorists" earlier this week after returning from a regional tour to gather information for the investigation into the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington.

Senators who accompanied Graham to Lebanon and Syria alluded to extremist camps in Lebanon's Palestinian refugee camps and the Bekaa valley, and said a lesson of September 11 was that Washington was slow to deal with such camps in Afghanistan.

Nasrallah said he was not opposed to working with Sunni groups, saying Hezbollah has relationships with Palestinian Sunni groups. But he said the United States had no evidence to link Hezbollah with Al Qaeda. "Until now, the U.S. administration has not been able to present half a shred of evidence about the existence of a relationship of this type," he said.