Bomb scare at Israeli Embassy in Dublin was false alarm, Irish police say

The Israeli Embassy in Ireland was evacuated Tuesday morning after a suspicious object was found on the premises. A team of Irish military sappers rushed to the scene to defuse what was believed to be a bomb.

Police erected a modest security cordon around the embassy during the alert but declared it a false alarm two hours later. Army bomb disposal experts inspected the parcel inside the building and said they found nothing dangerous.

Israel’s embassy in the Irish capital sits in a seven-story building at a busy crossroads in Ballsbridge, an upper-class district that is home to dozens of embassies, including the American Embassy.

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The Israeli Embassy regularly attracts protests by pro-Palestinian activists and also faces occasional security alerts, which typically turn out to be false alarms or malicious hoaxes.

The bomb scare comes on the heels of a terror attack in which five Israeli civilians and a local, Muslim bus driver were killed at the Burgas Airport in Bulgaria last month. Local authorities and Israel said Iran, operating through Hezbollah operatives, carried out the attack.

Israeli embassies around the world have beefed up security in order to prevent terror attacks by Iran and Hezbollah.

Earlier this year, there were three attempts to carry out terror attacks against Israeli diplomatic targets — one targeted embassy workers in Georgia, another was a failed plot to attack Israelis in Thailand, and the last targeted the Israeli Embassy in New Delhi, seriously injuring Tal Yehoshua Koren, the wife of a diplomat, when a bomb was attached to her vehicle.

Israel fingered Iran for all three terror plots and local authorities’ investigations found evidence linking the Islamic republic to the attacks.

Other recent terror attempts against Israeli targets, also allegedly orchestrated by Hezbollah and Iran, were thwarted in Cyprus and Kenya.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.