Trial Could Reveal Key Facts On Iran Network Targeting Americans
For over thirty years, the bombing of Alas Chiricanas Flight 901 in Panama, which killed 21 people including top Jewish businessmen and three U.S. citizens, remained unsolved and largely overlooked internationally. The aircraft exploded shortly after takeoff in 1994, with the only identified body being a middle Eastern male suspected of carrying the bomb. Recently, Panamanian authorities have arrested Ali Zaki Hage Jalil, a Colombian-Venezuelan of Lebanese descent and alleged Hezbollah mastermind, setting the stage for a important terrorism trial. This trial could reveal insights into Iran’s clandestine networks operating in Latin America, targeting U.S. citizens and regional interests.
Iran, under its Supreme Leader Ayatollah khamenei, has prioritized vengeance against the U.S., prompting Iranian-backed operations across Latin America. Iran and its proxies, Hezbollah and the IRGC, have established secret bases in several Latin American countries, including Bolivia, Brazil, Cuba, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Argentina, even though Panama and Mexico are less openly involved. Iran’s history in the region includes numerous attacks against Jewish and Israeli targets, such as the deadly 1994 Buenos Aires bombings and recent foiled plots against Israeli officials.
Evidence suggests Iran’s interest in attacking U.S.targets, indicated by past plots and intelligence operations, including efforts to monitor U.S. embassies and personnel. The arrest and trial of Hage Jalil could provide vital intelligence on Iran’s current activities and future threats in the Americas.
The article emphasizes that Panama has an opportunity to demonstrate cooperation with the U.S. by fully prosecuting Hage Jalil, especially considering past mishandlings of similar cases. A prosperous trial could improve regional security understanding and counter Iran’s influence in Latin America. the case highlights the ongoing strategic competition and the potential for increased threats against the U.S. in the region rooted in Iran’s clandestine activities.
For more than three decades, the mystery of who blew Alas Chiricanas Flight 901 out of the Panama sky, killing all 21 aboard, including 12 top Jewish businessmen and three U.S. citizens, remained unsolved and mostly forgotten by the outside world. The small commuter plane to Panama City exploded July 19, 1994, shortly after takeoff from Colon, leaving only one body in the wreckage, not positively identified for years: a Middle Eastern male thought to have carried the bomb aboard.
But now Panamanian authorities have the bombing’s suspected Iranian-backed Hezbollah mastermind in custody: Ali Zaki Hage Jalil, a 57-year-old Colombian-Venezuelan of Lebanese descent. A revelatory terrorism trial of the century is on the immediate horizon.
Judicial proceedings in Panama City promise to spotlight for Americans how Iran still fields clandestine networks in America’s backyard. These can target the large U.S. citizen expatriate population living in Central America and Mexico as well as thousands of regional American businesses.
After U.S.-Israel airstrikes killed his father, Iran’s new Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei wrote that his top strategic priority was to exact a blood “vengeance” on the United States and its leaders and that “freedom-seekers across the world [author’s emphasis] will each carry out part of this divine mission.”
Under pressure from a U.S. naval flotilla in November of last year, the FBI and Panama persuaded Maduro’s government to arrest Hage Jalil in the known Hezbollah enclave of Marguerita Island. In April, after Maduro was deposed, Venezuela extradited him to stand trial in Panama. Undoubtedly, Hage Jalil has remained plugged into the Iranian network on Marguerita Island and, with a successful trial, could fill actionable intelligence gaps about what Iran might be planning and how it operates.
More Recent Iranian Disruption
The Iranians and their proxies have been disruptive throughout Latin America.
While 30 years have passed since the Flight 901 bombing, as recently as November 2025, the U.S. and Israel publicly thanked Mexico for foiling an Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) plot to assassinate Israel’s ambassador to Mexico, Einat Kranz Neiger. Tehran and Mexico City later denied knowledge of such a plot.
Whatever may have happened last year in Mexico, no serious Latin American geopolitical scholar disagrees that Iran and its proxies, Hezbollah and the IRGC’s Quds Force, established clandestine operating bases in embassies throughout Latin America decades ago, in part, to counter Israeli and U.S. Iran policies in the Middle East.
The Atlantic Council, RAND and other policy institutes estimate that Hezbollah and the IRGC have enjoyed overt and clandestine access to 11 embassies and 36 Iran-linked Shiite “cultural centers” in tolerant or outright friendly Spanish-speaking nations governed by leftist leaders openly antithetical to the United States. These host nations included Bolivia, Brazil, Cuba, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Argentina.
Neither Panama nor Mexico usually makes that list of known hosts. But U.S. intelligence services may not know what they don’t know, which makes a Panama trial all the more important.
Iran’s Malign History in Latin America
Iran’s malign history in Latin America shows it has mainly targeted Jews and Israeli interests, as the Flight 901 bombing shows.
In 2024, Peruvian police arrested an Iranian citizen and member of the Quds Force on charges of planning to murder an Israeli. In 2023, Brazilian authorities arrested three suspected Hezbollah agents for plotting terror attacks against Jewish targets. In 2016, according to RAND, Bolivian police allegedly disrupted a Hezbollah bomb plot by seizing 2.5 tons of explosives from a La Paz warehouse.
Indeed, the Flight 901 bombing probably drew little attention back in 1994 because, only one day earlier, Hezbollah suicide bombers operating from the cover of Iran’s embassies truck-bombed a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, killing 85 and wounding 300, a lengthy 2006 Argentinian indictment alleges. That attack came two years after Hezbollah and IRGC operatives truck-bombed the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, killing 29 and injuring 242.
U.S. Soft Targets Next?
Iran’s announced strategic priority of vengeance tells the American security services to presume U.S. interests and citizens could be next.
Evidence has already emerged of Iranian interest in American targets. In 2021, Colombian authorities neutralized an Iranian regime attempt to kill two Israeli businessmen. But this was part of a larger operation that also targeted U.S. citizens to avenge President Trump’s killing of Iranian Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani in January 2020.
A pair of 2017-2018 U.S. court prosecutions of clandestine Hezbollah agents stationed in the United States revealed high interest in U.S. (and Israeli) targets within the Panama Canal zone.
FBI documents filed in the case against Samer El Debek of Dearborn, Michigan, alleged his Lebanon handlers sent him to Panama for a month in 2011 and again in 2012 to study the U.S. embassy’s positioning amid neighboring buildings, its security procedures, and periods when vehicular traffic outside was heaviest, court records showed. He sent the material back to his Hezbollah handlers in Lebanon.
Chance for Panama to Show Goodwill
Despite these cases, few Latin American countries have brought suspects to full revelatory trials. With Ali Zaki Hage Jalil in custody, Panamanian judicial authorities now have an opportunity to help America better understand how Iranian networks currently function and where an Iranian attack might originate.
Prior Panamanian governments haven’t always worked toward U.S. interests. After the bombing in 1994, Panamanian police arrested Hage Jalil with a dozen Mini-Mac submachine guns, military-grade detonation cord, and blasting caps. Inexplicably, they let him go and he disappeared. In late 2017, the Israeli government passed intelligence information to Panama naming Hage Jalil, then hiding in plain sight in Venezuela, as the mastermind. Panama’s then-President Juan Carlos Varela pledged to reopen the old investigation and get the suspect arrested but instead dragged his feet and never followed through.
Now is Panama’s chance to contribute something meaningful to its close ally, the United States. The Trump administration, FBI, and the American people have a lot riding on Panama’s ability and willingness to carry this ball over the goal line and should ensure that happens.
Todd Bensman is a senior research fellow for the Border Security and Immigration Center at The Heritage Foundation. Before joining Heritage in July 2026, Bensman served the Trump administration as senior adviser to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (ICE Office of Director) and the intelligence community as a National Counterterrorism Center detailee, where he served senior leadership on priority policy matters related to enforcing both legal and illegal immigration, southern border security, and the counter-cartel campaigns. Follow him on X @BensmanTodd.
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