Bulgaria erklærte i dag at etterforskningen viser at to av de tre hovedmennene bak angrepet på israelske turister i havnebyen Burgos i juli 2012 var medlemmer av Hizbollah.

Israel og USA forventer at EU følger i deres fotspor og stempler Hizbollah som en terrororganisasjon, men «utenriksansvarlig» Catherine Ashton advarte mot å trekke en så rask konklusjon. Et slikt vedtak må være enstemmig, sa hun, dvs. alle 27 medlemmer må stemme for.

Bulgaria’s interior minister, Tsvetan Tsvetanov, said at a news conference that the investigation into the bombingin Burgas in July 2012 found that a man with an Australian passport and a man with a Canadian passport were two of the three conspirators involved in the attack, which claimed the lives of five Israeli tourists and a Bulgarian bus driver.

Bulgarian investigators had “a well-founded assumption that they belonged to the military formation of Hezbollah,” Mr. Tsvetanov said.

Bulgarian officials have found themselves under pressure from Israel and the United States, which consider Hezbollah a terrorist organization, to blame it for the bus attack. But the Bulgarians also have been facing pressure from European allies like Germany and France, which regard Hezbollah as a legitimate political organization, to temper any finding on the sensitive issue.

The United States welcomed the finding. “We call on our European partners as well as other members of the international community to take proactive action to uncover Hizballah’s infrastructure and disrupt the group’s financing schemes and operational networks in order to prevent future attacks,” said John O. Brennan, President Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser and his nominee to run the Central Intelligence Agency, in a statement Tuesday.

But Catherine Ashton, the European Union’s high representative for foreign policy, responded with caution. “The implications of the investigation need to be assessed seriously as they relate to a terrorist attack on E.U. soil, which resulted in the killing and injury of innocent civilians,” she said in a statement.

An E.U. official, speaking on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue, said that the question of listing Hezbollah as a terrorist organization would have to be a unanimous decision by all 27 member states.

Det er utrolig å lese hvordan EU opprettholder et slags live-and-let-live med Hizbollah: de får samle inn penger og sitt kontaktnett mot å ligge lavt. EU kvier seg for å provosere Hizbollah.

A sort of modus vivendi exists where Hezbollah keeps a low profile for its fund-raising and other activities and Europeans do not crack down. In Germany alone, 950 people have been identified as being associated with the organization as of 2011. The group has always been treated as a benign force, even if assessments of the danger it presented vary greatly.

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“There’s the overall fear if we’re too noisy about this, Hezbollah might strike again, and it might not be Israeli tourists this time,” said Sylke Tempel, editor in chief of the German foreign affairs magazine Internationale Politik.