Top Hezbollah commander killed in Syria blast
Updated: 2008-02-13 19:01
Mughniyeh might have been killed by a rival group and not by a Western intelligence service, said Eliezer Tsafrir, who was the Mossad's Beirut station chief in 1983 and 1984, the time of the first attacks against US targets in which Mughniyeh was implicated.
"These people make a lot of internal enemies. So it doesn't necessarily have to be Israel or America," Tsafrir said.
But regardless of whether it was behind the attack, experts say Israel may benefit from a perception its Mossad spy agency has recovered its ability to hit top terror targets.
Mughniyeh was born on Dec. 7, 1962 in the south Lebanon village of Tair Debba. He joined the nascent Hezbollah in the early 1980s and formed a militant cell known as Islamic Jihad or Islamic Holy War. The cell was said to be Hezbollah's strike arm, but the group denies any link to it.
He is accused of masterminding the first major suicide bombing to target Americans: the April 1983 car bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut that killed 63 people, including 17 Americans. He is also blamed for a more devastating attack six months later, when suicide attackers detonated truck bombs at the barracks of French and US peacekeeping forces in Beirut, killing 59 French paratroopers and 241 American Marines.
He was indicted in the United States for the 1985 hijacking of TWA flight 847, during which Shiite militants shot Navy diver Robert Stethem, who was a passenger on the plane, and dumped his body on the tarmac of Beirut airport. The hijacking produced one of the most iconic images of pre-9/11 terrorism: a photo of the jet's pilot leaning out the cockpit window with a gunman waving a pistol in front of his face.
In the 1980s Mughniyeh was also believed to have directed a string of kidnappings of Americans and other foreigners in Lebanon. The hostages included The Associated Press's chief Mideast correspondent Terry Anderson, who was held for more than six years until his release in 1991; and CIA station chief William Buckley, who was tortured by his captors and killed in 1985.
"I can't say I'm either surprised or sad (by his death). He was not a good man -- certainly, the primary actor in my kidnapping and many others," Anderson told the AP on Wednesday. "To hear that his career has finally ended is a good thing, and it's appropriate that he goes up in a car bomb."
Anderson was the last American hostage freed in a complicated deal that involved Israel's release of Lebanese prisoners, Iran's sway with the kidnappers, Syria's influence and -- according to an Iranian radio broadcast -- promises by the United States and Germany not to retaliate against the kidnappers.
But Edward Djerejian, who was US ambassador to Syria at the time and was involved in negotiations through the Syrian government on hostage releases, said he had "no knowledge of such a deal" promising not to retaliate. "When I was in government we made no deals," he told the AP.
Giandomenico Picco, an Italian diplomat working at the time as a special assistant to U.N. Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar, said he was certain but never able to confirm that the hooded man he met in the slums of Beirut to finalize the deal was Mughniyeh.
Mughniyeh's trail of terror was believed to continue into the 1990s.
Israel accused Mughniyeh of involvement in the 1992 bombing of its embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina in which 29 people were killed.
Argentine special prosecutor Alberto Nisman also accused Mughniyeh in the 1994 bombing of a Buenos Aires Jewish center, an attack which killed 85 people. Prosecutors said Iranian officials orchestrated the attack and entrusted Hezbollah to carry it out.
The Khobar Towers bombing came two years later. Faris bin Hizam, a Saudi journalist who closely follows Islamic groups, said Mughniyeh flew to the kingdom days before the bombing and met the group that carried out the attack.
Mughniyeh spent his final years moving between Lebanon, Iran, Syria and Turkey, and used as many as 47 different forged passports, bin Hizam said.
His last public appearance was believed to be at the funeral of his brother Fuad, who was killed in 1994 by a booby-trapped car in Beirut. In 2006, Mughniyeh was reported to have met with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Syria.
Mughniyeh's body was brought to south Beirut in the afternoon and was laid in a refrigerated coffin, wrapped in Hezbollah's yellow flag.
His father -- Fayez, a south Lebanese farmer -- as well as Hezbollah's deputy leader, Sheik Naim Kassem, and other Hezbollah officials received condolences at the hall from allied Lebanese politicians and representatives of militant Palestinian factions. Though bitter rivals of Hezbollah, some pro-US politicians including Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora and parliamentary majority leader Saad Hariri offered written condolences.
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