A criminal complaint unsealed Friday in Manhattan federal court against a senior commander of Kataib Hezbollah includes a striking allegation buried in its pages: that operatives working for the Iranian-backed Iraqi militia may have been behind a pair of March shooting attacks in Toronto, including one targeting a shul.

The complaint against Mohammad Baqer Saad Dawood Al-Saadi — the high-ranking Kataib Hezbollah figure charged Friday in connection with a plot to bomb a Manhattan shul and a broader campaign of attacks across Europe and North America — quotes Al-Saadi telling an undercover law enforcement officer that his “people” had carried out two attacks in Canada, one against a consulate and one against a shul.

The undercover officer, according to court papers, took the consulate reference to mean the March 10 shooting at the U.S. consulate in Toronto, in which an unknown gunman fired at the building in the early morning hours. The Toronto Police Service said at the time that the shooting caused damage to the building but no injuries. The case had not previously been publicly linked to a foreign state actor.

The shul claim is harder to map. The greater Toronto area saw three separate shul shootings within a five-day span in March, in what the Anti-Defamation League called a tipping point for Canadian Jewry.

The first came on the evening of March 2, just after Purim, when a gunman fired multiple rounds into the front windows of Temple Emanu-El, a Reform congregation in North York. People were still inside the building when the shots were fired. No one was injured.

Four nights later, just before midnight on Friday, March 6, gunfire struck the front doors of Beth Avraham Yoseph of Toronto — the BAYT — one of the largest Orthodox congregations in North America, located in the heavily Jewish Thornhill section of Vaughan. Two facilities workers were inside cleaning up from an event that had just ended. Eight bullets shattered the glass; no one was hurt. Less than half an hour later, just after midnight on March 7, shots were fired into the front entrance of Shaarei Shomayim, a large Orthodox shul on Bathurst Street in North York.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney condemned the shootings as “criminal antisemitic attacks.” Ontario Premier Doug Ford called them “cowardly.” Rabbi Daniel Korobkin of the BAYT described the gunfire at his shul as “an appalling and cowardly act of evil.”

On May 6, the Toronto Police Service and York Regional Police announced the arrest of an 18-year-old man — who was not named because he was 17 at the time — in connection with the BAYT and Shaarei Shomayim shootings. He was charged with seven gun-related counts, including two counts of discharging a firearm into a place. Investigators did not file terrorism or hate-crime charges at the time of arrest, but Toronto Police Chief Myron Demkiw said the investigation remained open.

That leaves the March 2 shooting at Temple Emanu-El still without a publicly named suspect, and now potentially fitting within the framework Al-Saadi described to the undercover officer.

The Toronto allegations are a small piece of a sweeping U.S. case that, as laid out in the complaint, paints Al-Saadi as a one-man hub for a global wave of pro-Iran terrorism. Prosecutors say Al-Saadi planned, directed, or claimed responsibility for at least 18 attacks in Europe and two in Canada, many of them carried out under the banner of Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamiya (HAYI), described in the complaint as a component of Kataib Hezbollah.

The European attacks attributed to him include the firebombing of a Bank of New York Mellon building in Amsterdam, an attempted IED detonation at a Bank of America building in Paris, and the stabbing of two people in London, one of them a Jewish-American citizen.

In the United States, prosecutors allege, Al-Saadi pledged thousands of dollars in cryptocurrency to a person he believed was a hired attacker — but who was in fact an FBI undercover agent — to bomb a prominent Manhattan shul. He also allegedly provided the agent with photographs and maps of Jewish institutions in Los Angeles and Scottsdale, Arizona, as additional targets. Al-Saadi sent a $3,000 down payment and demanded the Manhattan attack be carried out by April 6, prosecutors said. He was arrested in Turkey and transferred to American custody before that deadline.

The campaign, according to the complaint, was framed by Al-Saadi as retaliation for the joint U.S.-Israeli military operation against Iran that began in late February, and as an attempt to pressure Washington and Jerusalem into halting it.

Kataib Hezbollah is widely regarded by U.S. officials as one of the most operationally capable proxies of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its overseas arm, the Quds Force. Court papers include photographs of Al-Saadi with Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the longtime Quds Force commander killed in a U.S. drone strike in Baghdad in January 2020. Prosecutors say Al-Saadi worked closely with both Suleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the Kataib Hezbollah founder killed in the same strike.

While the Iraqi militia has a long and well-documented record of attacks on American forces in Iraq and Syria, it has not historically operated at the kind of global reach implied by the latest U.S. complaint. If the Toronto allegations hold up, they would mark one of the clearest known instances of Iranian-directed terrorism reaching Jewish institutions on North American soil since the start of the current Middle East war, and would suggest that the wave of antisemitic violence Canadian Jewry has been absorbing for the past 2.5 years is, at least in part, being directed from Tehran.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)