Lebanon arrests Lebanese-Canadian for spying for Israel

"In the framework of pursuing operations to combat Israeli espionage... the directorate of General Security arrested a Lebanese-Canadian (F.G)," the General Security service said in a statement on Tuesday.

There were no details on exactly when or where he was detained.

The statement said the 40-year-old man confessed to being recruited in 2013 by a Lebanese fugitive it said belongs to an Israeli spying network described as "Unit 504". 

He was ordered to recruit Lebanese agents to spy on the Hizballah movement and collect information on missing Israeli airman Ron Arad, a navigator whose plane was shot down over Lebanon in 1986 and was thought to have been handed over to the group, the statement said.

Lebanon and Israel remain technically in a state of war, with occasional skirmishes along their shared ceasefire line.

In 2006, Lebanon's Hizballah movement fought a month-long war with the Jewish state that devastated parts of Lebanon.

That conflict killed more than 1,200 people in Lebanon, mostly civilians, and around 160 Israelis, most of them soldiers.

Hizballah, which holds sway over much of Lebanon's southern border region, is funded and armed by Israel's archfoe Iran.

Between April 2009 and 2014, Lebanese authorities detained more than 100 people accused of spying for Israel, most of them members of the military or telecom employees.

Such arrests have been less frequent recently.

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