In early September, a 38-year-old Azerbaijani with a Russian passport was arrested in Cyprus. During a search, a pistol, a silencer, cartridges, three telephones, gloves and a list of people including five names of Israeli citizens were found in his car.
He was arrested immediately after crossing the demarcation line dividing the free territory of the Republic of Cyprus and the Turkish-occupied northern part of the island through the Agios Dometrios checkpoint. During the investigation it was established that he crossed the demarcation line in both directions many times.
The pistol found with him was a gas pistol, converted for firing live ammunition.
These pistols are manufactured in Turkey and sold on the European Union market through Bulgaria. They are often used by members of organized criminal communities, as these pistols can be easily converted to the 7.65 × 17 mm SR live cartridge by replacing the barrel. Europol is looking for people involved in the circulation of this pistol, which turned out to be not the only one in this case.
A few days after the arrest of the Azerbaijani, the Israeli authorities accused Iran of conspiracy to kill the Israelis. The office of the Prime Minister of Israel said that «Iran has organized a terrorist act against Israeli businessmen» living on the island.
The Cypriot authorities have launched an investigation into the planned crime. During October, Cypriot police arrested five more suspected people in assisting the arrested Azerbaijani in planning and organizing a terrorist act against the Israelis.
According to the police, the four detainees are natives of Pakistan, permanently residing in Cyprus. Another arrested person is a 21-year-old man from Lebanon. All five of those arrested were associated with an Azerbaijani hitman with a Russian passport. In addition, they all worked as couriers for food delivery companies
Police said the two arrested Pakistanis had photographs of potential targets on their phones, as well as evidence that they were involved in spying on them.
The second pistol was discovered and delivered by the Cypriot authorities from the occupied territories to the free part of Cyprus on 20 October. This is a Glock 9mm pistol. He was discovered by a Greek Cypriot in a hotel in the occupied territories. He contacted journalist Manolis Kalatzis and said that the 38-year-old arrested Azerbaijani stayed in the same hotel as he and hid a pistol on the roof along with two loaded clips, a magazine and a mobile phone.
The third pistol appeared in the case after the detained 27-year-old Pakistani citizen, who in recent months worked in Paphos as a food delivery courier, confessed during interrogation to possession of a firearm and indicated the place where he hid it. On October 30, police found a 9mm XTOUCH TECHNOLOGY SUB COMPAC pistol in a cache.
Food and information delivery
With the development of IT technologies, many things and services familiar to us have acquired new qualities and have become more accessible to most people, including outside the civilized world, where people do not participate in their creation and development, but only use them.
But technological progress brings with it not only improvements in the quality of life of people in various spheres. Together with him, new types of crime have come into our lives, new threats to our security and new methods of hostile activity on the part of authoritarian and dictatorial regimes.
Technological progress has given the criminals new tools that they skillfully use.
We do not think about how the technology of conventional services may affect us, the consumers of these services. It does not occur to us that ordering the simplest food delivery service can be fraught with mortal danger for those who use this service.
With the onset of the pandemic in Cyprus and around the world, the demand for ready-to-eat food delivery services has grown sharply, which has led to the emergence of many companies providing this service.
Today in Cyprus couriers of many companies are engaged in food delivery. The leaders in this market in Cyprus today are three companies — Foody, Wolt, and Bolt.
On the websites of these companies, you can find information that anyone can become a food delivery courier and start working for these companies. To do this, you need to have identity documents, a license to drive a vehicle and the vehicle itself.
But somehow, miraculously, it turned out that almost all the couriers working for these companies are Pakistanis. Moreover, they control and coordinate the work of numerous couriers for the delivery of food, also immigrants from Pakistan living in Cyprus. According to our data, these controllers are from five to ten people. Some of them are in Cyprus illegally.
They are the ones who decide who can and cannot work as a courier for a food delivery company, despite the simplicity of the requirements for hiring this job.
These people, let’s call them «foremen», imposed tribute on most of the couriers for the delivery of food in Cyprus and, according to some reports, take from them from a third to half of their daily wages. According to various estimates, each of the foremen receives from compatriots under their control from two to five thousand euros a day.
But this is not the most interesting part of the work of food delivery service in Cyprus. The most interesting thing is that all Pakistanis involved in this business are engaged in collecting and transferring information about clients to their foremen. Those, in turn, enter this data into the customer database they have created, which is constantly updated as orders for the delivery of ready-made food arrive.
It works like this: the client orders food in some restaurant and provides his data — name, address or location and phone number. This data is transmitted to the couriers for the delivery of food in order for them to fulfill the order and deliver the food to its destination. Having received the client’s data, the couriers transfer them to their foremen.
In addition, couriers have instructions for collecting additional information informally.
Such as the nationality of the client, in which house he lives, the number of people in the house, the quality of the dwelling, whether there are additional entrances to the house or apartment, numbers and brands of cars (only if they are expensive), are there dogs in the house, the presence of an alarm and surveillance cameras and much more. All this data is entered into a database created by the Pakistanis and is updated as orders are received from specific customers.
Needless to say, such activity is contrary to Cypriot and European legislation and can be considered a criminal offense.
Successful business
The Cyprus Daily News has learned that the Pakistanis have created a database of customers ordering food delivery, which is collected and regularly updated by couriers in order to sell it to all interested individuals and organizations.
According to the Cyprus Daily News, this database is widely used by ethnic criminal groups operating in Cyprus, as well as burglars and car thieves.
The Cyprus Daily News has information that several embassies in Cyprus have acquired this database.
According to the Cyprus Daily News, this database is widely and effectively used by Turkish and Iranian intelligence services.
The first to understand the value of this database were the Turkish special services operating on the territory of Cyprus. They established constant contact with the leaders of the Pakistanis living in Cyprus and bought this database from them. This allowed the Turkish special services in Cyprus to expand their capabilities.
Following the Turks, this database was bought by Iranian intelligence. By purchasing this database, the Iranian special services set themselves a specific task, namely, to collect additional information about the Israelis permanently living in Cyprus. They were interested in specific persons.
Iranian plans
As you know, Iran is striving to create nuclear weapons and for this is developing the nuclear industry. At the same time, the Iranian leadership declares that it is doing this exclusively for peaceful purposes and has no intention of creating atomic weapons. It is very clear to sane people that this is a lie. The development of the nuclear industry in Iran has only one goal — the creation of an atomic bomb with the help of which, as Iranian Ayatollahs have repeatedly and openly stated, Iran intends to destroy Israel and establish its hegemony in the Middle East region.
Only Obama did not understand this and therefore made a deal with Iran, which actually untied the hands of the Ayatollahs.
Trump understood this very well and therefore withdrew from the nuclear deal that was beneficial to Iran and imposed sanctions that were fatal for the Iranian economy.
Now, after the return of the Democrats to the White House, the Biden administration, the leaders of the European Union and the IAEA leadership do not want to understand this. They again talked about returning to the deal with Iran.
After the Mossad stole and delivered to Israel the entire archive of the Iranian nuclear program, Iran’s desire to acquire nuclear weapons was documented.
However, this did not help the democratic leaders of the United States and the leadership of the European Union to admit the obvious and, instead of flirting with crazy ayatollahs, to take measures to deprive them of the opportunity to create nuclear weapons.
Israel, realizing that, as usual, it needs to solve the problem of survival on its own, has for many years now been alone opposing Iran’s efforts to create an atomic bomb. Israeli intelligence services have carried out many brilliant operations to contain the Iranian nuclear program, such as cyber attacks on nuclear facilities and the elimination of nuclear scientists working to create Iran’s nuclear weapons.
Since 2007, Israeli Mossad agents have killed six Iranian nuclear scientists who were working on a nuclear weapons program. Among them is the Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who was called the head of Iran’s nuclear program. It was eliminated at the end of November 2020 by Mossad agents using a specially created killer robot.
The demoniac Ayatollahs have set the Iranian special services the task of carrying out retaliatory actions. It was decided to kill the Israelis involved in planning and conducting covert operations to eliminate nuclear scientists in Iran. After several unsuccessful attempts to create an intelligence network in Israel, Tehran realized that they had no chance of killing any of the Israelis in Israel.
Therefore, in the depths of the Ministry of Information of the Islamic Republic of Iran (Iranian intelligence), a plan has matured to kill Israelis living outside Israel and involved, in their opinion, in the activities of the Israeli special services.
Among the targets was an Israeli businessman and four of his partners, also Israeli citizens who lived in Cyprus, in Nicosia.
To kill Israelis in Nicosia, the Iranians hired a killer in Azerbaijan with Russian citizenship and who had long-standing ties with the Iranian special services. This became known in the Ministry of National Security of Azerbaijan and the Azerbaijanis immediately conveyed this information to their Israeli colleagues.
It should be noted here that Israel has developed very close and friendly ties with Azerbaijan. The Mossad has complete freedom of action against Iran from the territory of Azerbaijan. Israel supplied Azerbaijan with modern high-precision weapons and trained Azerbaijani officers in the methods of modern warfare.
In many ways, this played a decisive role in the defeat of the Armenian army in the last year’s war for Karabakh.
According to the same source in the Cypriot police, after the information collected about the Iranian agent was analyzed and after his arrest, access to his phones was obtained, it became clear that a significant part of the initial information about Israeli citizens was obtained from a database created by Pakistani couriers. … In particular, from this database, the Iranians learned their mobile phone numbers and addresses.
Access to the database created by the Pakistanis made it much easier for the Iranians to initially collect information about the intended targets and plan an operation to eliminate them.
Cypriot law enforcement agencies were able to find out who, how and when sold the Pakistani-created database to the Iranians.
The Cyprus Daily News sent inquiries to food delivery companies, but no responses were received at the time of publication.
Of course, not all food delivery couriers of Pakistani origin are agents of Iranian, Turkish and other special services. However, the problem of illegal collection of information about customers by couriers and its subsequent sale to interested persons and organizations, including the secret services of hostile states, is very serious. It requires control and new methods of solving it.
The next time a swarthy, smiling courier brings you food home next time, think if there is someone in the world to whom he could sell information about you, which can lead to the most undesirable consequences for you.
Bon Appetit.
Ivan SMIRNOV