Finns buy Israeli missile tested on Lebanese civilians

Nicholas Blanford

Daily Star staff

Finland has agreed to purchase an Israeli anti-tank missile that members of UNIFIL’s Finnish battalion saw being test-fired against civilian targets in south Lebanon over a 16-month period.

One Lebanese civilian was killed and at least four others were wounded before the Israeli Army declassified the weapon and placed it on the international arms market.

The Spike anti-tank missile will equip the Finnish Army’s high-readiness brigades once Helsinki has concluded the terms of the $40 million deal with the German-Israeli EuroSpike consortium.

The Finnish Defense Ministry told The Daily Star it was unaware that civilians had been killed and wounded by the Spike but said it was unlikely that the decision to purchase the missile would be reversed.

The Spike is one of three advanced anti-tank weapons developed by Israel’s state-owned Rafael armaments company. The other two weapons are the Gil, a shoulder-fired missile with a range of 2.5 kilometers, and the NT-Dandy ­ also known as Long Spike ­ a long-range missile capable of being fired from ground platforms or helicopter gunships.

The Spike is the medium-range version of the NT-Dandy. In August 1998, The Daily Star revealed that the Israeli Army was testing a new, top secret anti-tank missile in the South, and identified the weapon as probably the NT-Dandy. In response to the story, Rafael said that the only anti-tank missile developed by the company was the Gil.

The Spike was declassified by the Israeli Army a year later and the NT-Dandy joined its two smaller versions on the global arms market last November.

In a bid to increase international sales of the weapons system, Rafael formed the EuroSpike consortium with the German companies, STN Atlas, Diehl and Rheinmetal.

According to Jane’s Defense Weekly, the hi-tech Spike can be used in a fire-and-forget mode in which the gunner locks the warhead’s seeker onto the target and the missile finds its own way there. Alternatively, a fire-observe-and-update mode allows the missile to switch targets during flight via a fiber-optic wire.

The missile, which was sold to the Singaporean Army more than a year ago, is considered one of the leading weapons of its kind in the world, in direct competition with the US Javelin and two systems developed by Euromissile: the TRIGAT medium-range missile and the Milan 3.

But the Spike and the NT-Dandy have a less auspicious reputation among the Lebanese, where the battlefields of the South allowed the Israeli Army to test the missiles with impunity.

The first recorded sighting of the Spike/NT-Dandy in south Lebanon was on Feb. 25, 1998, when a missile was fired from the Israeli outpost in Taibe at a civilian car in Majdal Silm, 7.5 kilometers away. The occupants of the car escaped unhurt.

Three months later, two identical missiles were fired from Taibe at a squad of Amal fighters on the edge of Majdal Silm.

The Taibe outpost was in the center of the area manned by the Finnish UNIFIL battalion. Finnish soldiers reported that the missiles were fired 2 minutes apart and made a noise like a “jet plane.” The first missile veered off course and exploded harmlessly. The second, the soldiers recorded, “appeared to be searching for its target” as it approached the guerrillas before plunging to the ground and exploding. Three fighters were wounded in the blast, one seriously.

Just 12 days later, another missile sought out and killed Mohammed Mouqalled, 17, in a wadi beside Arab Salim. Mohammed’s brother Hussein, 20, suffered a burns to his back in the explosion.

On July 6, 1998, Norwegian UNIFIL soldiers witnessed the missile flying over their sector before crashing into a hill. The Israeli Army instructed UNIFIL not to approach the crash site.

On Nov. 13, 1998, three children were targeted by the missile in the same place where Mouqalled had been killed six months earlier.

Rami Abu Zeid, 13, was struck by metal fragments in the shoulder, chest and stomach when the missile exploded 3 meters away from him. His friends, Ali Darwish, 14, and his brother Jaafar, 10, escaped unhurt.

The last recorded firing of the missile was on June 20, 1999. At least two civilians, including a 3-year-old child, were wounded when one of three missiles slammed into an abandoned house in the center of Qabrikha, 30 meters from a Ghanaian UNIFIL position.

The Ghanaian peacekeepers logged the source of the attack as coming from an Israeli outpost on the border beside Margaliot, 8 kilometers southeast of Qabrikha and out of direct line of sight to the targeted building.

Witnesses from the village and circumstantial evidence, however, indicated that the missiles were fired from Taibe, 5.5 kilometers to the northeast. The five attacks against civilian or guerrilla targets over the 16-month period were all linked by the lengthy distances flown by the missiles, the weaving trajectories and identical fragments collected by UNIFIL, the Lebanese Army and The Daily Star from the blast sites.

Arto Koski, spokesman at the Finnish Defense Ministry, said the Finnish government had no knowledge of the attacks.

“We didn’t have any kind of information on these unfortunate incidents,” he said.

Although Koski said he would inform his superiors in the ministry, he thought it would have little effect.

“I don’t think that the procurement program, which has been confirmed by the ministry, would change,” he said. “We based our decision on technical and commercial evaluations.”

The UK and Germany have both chosen Euromissile’s TRIGAT for their armies. But the UK has indicated it is seeking a lighter anti-tank weapon for its rapid-reaction forces. Germany is also considering purchasing a lighter missile. According to Jane’s Defense Weekly, the only real competitor in this category to the US Javelin is the Spike.