By Todd Bensman for The Heritage Foundation
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 business leaders 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. A revelatory terrorism trial-of-the-century is on the immediate horizon.
What knowledge might come out of Ali Zaki Hage Jalil, a long-wanted 57-year-old Colombian-Venezuelan of Lebanese descent, matters to the United States. Not just because justice might be done for what Iran’s terrorist network allegedly did long ago but of what Iran’s leadership wants them to do right now against U.S. interests.
After U.S.-Israel airstrikes killed his father, Iran’s new Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khameinei announced at the Ayatollah’s July 9 funeral that his top strategic priority was to exact “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.”
Judicial proceedings in Panama City promise to spotlight for Americans that Iran still fields clandestine networks in America’s back yard. These can target 1.6 million U.S. citizen expatriates living in Central America and Mexico as well as thousands of American businesses in the vicinity.
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 or how it operates.
More recent Iranian Disruption
The timing couldn’t be better for a teaching moment. The Iranians and their proxies have been plenty disruptive in Latin America.
While 30 years have passed since the Flight 901 bombing, as recently as March 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 Neige. Tehran and Mexico City later denied this.
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, the Rand Corporation 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 government by leftist leaders openly antithetical to the United States. These host nations included Bolivia, Brazil, Cuba, Paraguay, Urugay, and Argentina.
Neither Panama nor Mexico usually make 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 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. 2016, Bolivian police thwarted 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.
But Iran’s new strategic priority tells the American security services to presume U.S. interests and citizens should be next.
U.S. soft targets next?
Evidence has already emerged of interest in American targets. In 2021, Colombian authorities neutralized an Iranian regime assassination attempt to kill two Israeli businessmen. But this was part of a larger operation that also targeted U.S. citizens to avenge the Trump 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, where it probably remains.
A chance for Panama to show useful good will
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 the networks currently function and from where an Iran attack might occur.
Prior Panamanian governments haven’t always played well in the sandbox. 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 swore he’d 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.
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