From a Beirut suburb to Caracas: Passports as a security façade in the network

A heavy night fell over Venezuela’s Island Margarita on 6 November 2025. An Interpol unit raided a modest house in a quiet coastal town and arrested a man bearing a double Arab name: Ali Zaki Haj Jalil.

Venezuelan police said he was “a Venezuelan national”. Still, a Panamanian government statement described the detainee as “a suspect in the July 19, 1994, bombing of Panamanian passenger flight Alas Chiricanas 901", an attack attributed to Lebanon’s Hezbollah. The name did not cause an immediate media storm locally. Still, the incident felt like the retrieval of an old shadow from the eighties and nineties: an era of dual identities, foreign kidnappings and assassinations, and passports that opened closed doors between the Middle East and Latin America.

In 2014, the US Department of State’s Rewards for Justice program announced a reward of up to $5 million for information leading to the arrest or conviction of those involved in the July 19, 1994, bombing of Alas Chiricanas Flight 901, which killed three American citizens and seventeen others. Among the suspects mentioned was a man named Ali Hawwa Jamal, believed to be responsible for the bombing. US investigations and images presented in the inquiry point to a role for Ali Zaki Haj Jalil and others in the plot, and to their flight to several countries after the attack.

Decades of disappearing into the shadows  

Since the 1980s, Hezbollah cells acted as a practical extension of the concept called “Islamic Jihad,” a name used by Iran-linked cells to carry out kidnappings and bombings against Western -and even Arab- targets, such as the bombing of the Iraqi embassy in Beirut.

Those years were the formation phase of a complex intelligence apparatus in Lebanon, operating under various names and led by several figures, most notably Imad Mughniyeh. That apparatus benefited from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ training, techniques, and smuggling networks for weapons and fighters through Syria, which was allied with Tehran in its war with Baghdad.

While Lebanese were consumed by civil war, Hezbollah built a web of corridors linking Beirut with Damascus and Tehran, later stretching into Africa and North and South America, where a triangle of death and smuggling formed between Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay.

Operations carried out at the time -aircraft hijackings, detention of foreign hostages, assassination of diplomats- required “new names” and non-Lebanese passports. Hundreds of Hezbollah operatives moved to Europe and elsewhere under the pretext of seeking asylum away from the civil war, even as they built their own networks to act as a rear support: trading and smuggling, buying modern equipment, or living in so-called “sleeper cells” to carry out specific operations at designated times.

Some of these groups obtained different citizenships legitimately, while others acquired passports through forgery. In the intelligence world, a passport is more than a travel document: it is the mask of another state covering the faces of suspects in terrorist operations that have spanned decades. Thus began the story of the “revolutionary friendship passports” woven by the Party within environments aligned with Iran and Syria.

The geography of collusion

In the 1990s, with the Cold War receding and the Soviet Union collapsing, the ties between regimes that had supported terrorism and states backed by the West expanded, in many cases obliging those states to dispose of old files. The late Syrian president Hafez al-Assad handed over “oppositionists and revolutionaries” such as elements of the Japanese Red Army to Tokyo; he handed PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan to Ankara; and Carlos “the Jackal” was handed to France, which sentenced him to life imprisonment. These handovers acted as a clearing of old records and an attempt to remove the specter of accountability from the regime. Before the Iraqi regime fell, Saddam Hussein’s forces assassinated Sabri al-Banna (Abu Nidal) in Baghdad in 2002; Iraqi authorities announced his death as suicide, while his movement accused Iraqi authorities of assassination. That killing was described at the time as a step by Saddam to demonstrate possible cooperation with the West to preserve his rule, though the Americans had other plans.

By contrast, when Hugo Chávez assumed Venezuela’s presidency in 1999, Caracas became fertile ground for smuggling and killing networks seeking a legal cover. Chávez sought to build a socialist state modeled on Cuba, fueled by enormous oil wealth and resources he hoped would be used to “bow” the United States, whom he called “the Yankees". He therefore opened extraordinary channels and relations with Damascus, Tehran, and even North Korea.

During those years, Chávez granted travel documents and new identities to wanted individuals around the world; Ali Zaki Haj Jalil was only one among thousands of migrants who found in Caracas an alternative home far from pursuit and from the reach of the US intelligence apparatus, the CIA.

What made Ali Zaki Haj Jalil’s case exceptional was his escape from prosecution over the Panama plane bombing and his possession of a Venezuelan passport, one that US investigations say is part of a series of documents issued to people from Lebanon, Syria, and Iran over the past two decades.

Congressional Homeland Security reports (2025) cite figures suggesting more than 10,000 Venezuelan passports were granted to people suspected of ties to Hezbollah or Hamas, allowing them to move without falling into the hands of pursuing intelligence services, and to carry new names and identities that permitted them to live and continue their security work.

These revelations were accompanied by a statement from Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, who described the Caracas regime as “a terrorist structure linked to Iran", saying that “Hezbollah operates from the heart of the American continent under the cover of passports and illicit trade", Her remarks provoked the “anger” of Nicolás Maduro’s government, which viewed them as part of a “political smearing campaign". Still, they reopened the question: has Venezuela truly become a refuge for alternative identities fabricated for covert networks?
His handover to Interpol at this moment looked like Caracas’s attempt to preempt US pressure launched by President Donald Trump.

The passport as a security instrument

A 2023 RAND Corporation report on unconventional networks in Latin America notes that Hezbollah uses three intertwined tools: first, commercial cover through small companies run by Lebanese migrants and others with minor roles; second, financial transfers routed through Africa to Lebanon by air and sea; and third -and most importantly- identity documents and passports from countries whose records are easily penetrated, such as Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua.

A Venezuelan passport issued by the official SAIME agency bears a genuine number and signature, but it can be granted to a non-Venezuelan after purchasing an identity or falsifying civil registry entries; thus, it becomes “legally formal, illegitimately guaranteed". With such a passport, its holder can enter more than 120 countries visa-free, open bank accounts, establish companies, or travel from Africa to the Middle East without arousing suspicion.

According to testimony from former Venezuelan officials, SAIME staff received exceptional requests “by high-level direction” to grant citizenship to people who had never lived in the country, in exchange for sums between $10,000 and $20,000 via intermediaries from the Lebanese or Iranian diaspora; thereafter a real identity card and an official passport would be issued and used to open companies or bank accounts.

This pattern makes intelligence tracing almost impossible, since one cannot distinguish between a true citizen and a fraud except by returning to paper archives that often no longer exist.

From the diamond trade to cocaine

Western analysts believe the alliance between Hezbollah and Latin American smuggling networks began in the 1990s through diamond trading in Africa and later evolved into cocaine trafficking. A 2022 Atlantic Council study, “The Maduro–Hezbollah Nexus", reported that Hezbollah, together with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, established cells operating in the Paraguay–Argentina–Brazil triangle, where there is a large Lebanese diaspora and links with other networks of Korean, Chinese, and even African origin. That region became the heart of financing operations later uncovered by US agencies.

There, the Venezuelan passport was not merely a document; it functioned as a banking corridor enabling transfers from Latin American banks to “charitable” institutions in Lebanon.

The same scenario repeated in Canada. Investigations published by CTV News in 2018 found that Lebanese networks transported hidden cash in cars to African countries, where individuals later returned it to Lebanon on commercial flights.

As appears, money, passports, and smuggling form a triangle whose sides are completed only with some official or quasi-official cover, often mediated by states allied with Iran.

Thus, the passport is not only a means of travel but a symbol of escape from international scrutiny: a transit card that conceals the real name and reshapes identity within a black market where intelligence, commerce, and narcotics intersect.

Through it, one person can live three lives: a gold trader in Venezuela, a businessman in Abidjan, and a social activist in the southern suburb of Beirut. In that sense, “Ali Zaki Haj Jalil” is more than a name; he is a multi-faced archetype reflecting the broader phenomenon of gray identities produced by covert wars.

When Ali Zaki Haj Jalil was arrested on Island Margarita, he carried neither weapons nor explosives -only a valid Venezuelan passport- an official document bearing the state emblem, his photo with a light mustache and a calm face.

But behind that image lies a history of secret relations between “resistance movements” and anti-Western states, and an entire system of a shadow economy and dual identities.

From Caracas to the suburb, the threads that link money, identity, and politics extend across a Cold War that has not yet ended. Will Ali Zaki be extradited to Panama? Will investigations expose the list of suspicious passports? No one holds the answer.

What is certain is that the identity game is no longer merely a means of travel; it has become a strategic weapon in shadow battles.