According to UPI.com, a local resident of the Lebanese town of Bint Jbail became suspicious after he spotted a tracking device attached to the bird. The metal ring on the bird’s leg indicated it was from Tel Aviv University.
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A vulture captured in Lebanon on suspicion of spying for Israel has been returned home with the help of the United Nations, Israeli authorities said Friday.
“In the 21st century we expect people to understand that wild animals are not harmful”, it added.
It is not the first time a griffon vulture has been taken to be an agent of the Israeli spy agency Mossad. “We hope that the Lebanese will release him”.
The vulture had crossed the border some days before and flown about four kilometres (2.5 miles) into Lebanon, the authority said.
“[Locals in Lebanon] caught the bird for sure”, says Ohad Hatzofe, bird ecologist at the reserve in the Golan Heights, which Israel occupied from Syria in 1967. It turns out she disappeared from a nature preserve in Israel earlier this week.
“Once it was determined “it was not carrying any hostile equipment”, the vulture was released in the same place it was caught”, according to local Arabic news sites.
Israelis, however, scoffed at the claim, and demanded the Lebanese let the vulture go. In 2011, the Saudis accused a different vulture of espionage – it also had a Global Positioning System transmitter and university ID tag. In 2010, an Egyptian official said that Israel-controlled sharks could be involved in a number of attacks on tourists in the Red Sea.
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Last summer, the Palestinian resistance movement, Hamas, announced that it had detected and captured a dolphin equipped with a video camera for an Israeli espionage operation off the shore of the Gaza Strip.
