Sweden’s security services on Thursday flatly denied that a Swedish man released from the prison camps here in 2004 was responsible for a suicide bombing of a busload of Israeli tourists at a Bulgarian port city.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been blaming Iran for the suicide attack Wednesday at the airport in the Black Sea coast holiday spot of Burgas, Bulgaria, that killed at least seven people.
But Israeli media quoted Bulgarian news reports as identifying the bomber as 33-year-old Stockholm-born Mehdi Ghezali, who according to leaked Guantánamo documents was sent back to his homeland eight years ago. According to a prison camps risk assessment provided to McClatchy Newspapers by WikiLeaks, Ghezali was transferred just weeks after the assessment recommended his repatriation to further detention in Sweden.
In Stockholm, spokesmen for both the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the national security services agency said separately that Ghezali had been ruled out as the bomber.