(AP)
(AP)
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Authorities are investigating whether the suicide bomber who blew up a bus packed with Israeli tourists in Bulgaria was a former Guantanamo Bay prisoner with a long trail of suspected terrorist ties.
Bulgarian and Israeli media reported yesterday that Mehdi Ghezali, 33, was the shaggy-haired man seen in surveillance video wearing Bermuda shorts and carrying a backpack at Burgas airport.
The man detonated explosives in the backpack when he got aboard the bus Wednesday, killing six innocent people and wounding 34 others, most of them Israelis.
Ghezali, a Swedish citizen, was freed from jail in three different countries in the last 12 years, each time for lack of evidence — while becoming the hero of an anti-Gitmo documentary and vowing to sue the United States for millions of dollars.
He was in Afghanistan on 9/11 and was arrested in January 2002 in the Tora Bora mountains, where al Qaeda fighters had fled from coalition forces. He was freed from Gitmo after two years and later griped about torture at the hands of his captors.
The FBI is helping Bulgarian and Israeli investigators identify the bomber through DNA and other means. An Israeli government source told The Post they are investigating whether Ghezali was responsible.
Swedish officials yesterday denied Ghezali was the bomber, and a US official said preliminary indications are “that it’s not Ghezali.”
Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borisov said whoever carried out the horrific attack used a Michigan driver’s license for ID. The license was bogus — and the address listed on it was a location in Baton Rouge, La., that turned out to be a casino.
Bulgarian Interior Minister Tsvetan Tsvetanov said the bomber had spent between four days and a week in the country but his whereabouts before that were unknown.
Aside from Ghezali, suspicion fell on the Hezbollah terrorist network, which is closely allied with Iran and is suspected of carrying out attacks abroad on Israeli diplomats
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said flatly the bombing “was carried out by Hezbollah, the long arm of Iran.”
His defense minister, Ehud Barak, hinted at retaliation. Israel “will do all it can to find those responsible and punish them, both those who carried it out directly and those who dispatched them,” he said.
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast called the accusation “baseless.”
Tsvetanov hinted that the bomber was part of a much larger conspiracy.
“We cannot exclude the possibility that he had logistical support on Bulgarian territory,” he said without elaboration.
A source briefed on the investigation told The Post, “US and Russian security services were warned in the winter about a possible attack in Bulgaria later this year.”
The Israeli tourists had just arrived on a charter flight from Tel Aviv carrying 154 people, including eight children. Some of them told Israeli TV they were just boarding the white bus in the airport parking lot for a ride to their hotel when the blast occurred.