Pat Dollard | Young Americans

This is the human sewage that blew up the Marine Barracks in Beirut…

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Israel Denies Involvement

Times Online:

Imad Mughniyeh, the Hezbollah mastermind behind the kidnapping of Westerners in Beirut and many big terror attacks around the world in the 1980s and 1990s, was killed late last night in a car bomb explosion in Damascus.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack, which occurred in the Syrian capital’s smart Kfar Soussa district, although Hezbollah blamed Israeli agents.

His death is a huge blow to the Iranian-backed militant group, given Mughniyeh’s years of experience and organisational skills.

Imad Mughnieh with the pilot of a TWA flight that he hijacked in Beirut, 1985

He was commander of Hezbollah’s military wing, which he helped to build up into the formidable machine that fought the Israeli Army to a standstill in the war of summer 2006.

“With all due pride, we declare a great jihadist leader of the Islamic Resistance in Lebanon joining the martyrs . . . The brother commander hajj Imad Mughniyeh became a martyr at the hands of the Zionist Israelis,” said a statement carried by Hezbollah’s Al-Manar television channel. The station broke off normal programming to broadcast verses from the Koran.

Heavy gunfire broke out from the Ain Dilba quarter of the Shia-dominated southern suburbs of Beirut as the news spread. Ain Dilba, a run-down neighbourhood next to Beirut airport, was Mughniyeh’s Beirut home.

Israel today denied any involvement in Mughniyeh’s death. “Israel rejects any attempt by terrorist organisations to attribute to it any implication in this affair,” said a statement from the office of Ehud Olmert, the Prime Minister.

There was no immediate reaction in Washington. The US placed a $25 million bounty on Mughniyeh’s head for his role in the hijacking of a TWA airliner in 1985 in which a US navy diver was killed.

Mughniyeh’s death came on the eve of an expected mass rally in central Beirut to mark the third anniversary of the assassination of Rafik Hariri, a former Lebanese prime minister. Lebanon is in the throes of a grave political crisis pitting the anti-Syrian March 14 parliamentary coalition against the Hezbollah-led Opposition.

The country has been without a president since November, and the rate of bomb attacks has increased. Scuffles and shootings between supporters of rival groups have broken out on a near daily basis recently. Mughniyeh’s death will do nothing to ease those tensions.

Walid Jumblatt, an outspoken March 14 leader, told The Times that Mughniyeh’s death was “good news”, and hinted that the Hezbollah commander may have been betrayed by his Syrian allies.

“It could have been the Syrians,” he said. “Damascus is well protected and I don’t think somebody else could do it.”

However, Israel’s assassins have penetrated Damascus before. In September 2004, a senior commander of the Palestinian Hamas movement was killed in a similar car bomb explosion.

Hezbollah is likely eventually to stage some form of retaliation to Mughniyeh’s death.

In March 1992, the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires was blown up, killing 29 people, in an operation said to have been planned by Mughniyeh. The bombing was claimed by Islamic Jihad in retaliation for Israel’s assassination a month earlier of the Hezbollah leader Sheikh Abbas Mussawi.

“Hezbollah are wise people and they will not react hastily. They will study and reflect before they do anything,” said Ibrahim Mussawi, the Editor of Hezbollah’s Al-Intiqad newspaper.

Mughniyeh was a Shia Lebanese originally from the village of Teir Dibba in south Lebanon. He was born in 1962 and as a teenager joined Force 17, the elite unit of the Fatah faction headed by Yassir Arafat, the Palestinian leader.

After Israeli forces expelled the Palestinians from Beirut during the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Mughniyeh joined a group of Shia Islamists then coalescing under the stewardship of Iranian Revolutionary Guards in the Bekaa Valley. The group became Hezbollah, and Mughniyeh, despite his youth, was considered one of its most capable figures.

He is believed to have overseen the April 1983 suicide bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut and, six months later, the twin suicide truck bomb attacks against the US Marine barracks and the French paratroop headquarters in Beirut, altogether killing nearly 400 people.

He is also alleged to have run the networks of kidnappers who snatched dozens of foreigners in Beirut in the mid to late 1980s, including Terry Waite, the former envoy to the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the British journalist John McCarthy.

Unlike Osama bin Laden, with whom he is sometimes compared, Mughniyeh never gave interviews nor released statements to the public. He lived in the shadows, aware that he was targeted for assassination by the Americans and Israelis.

Rumours covered for the absence of hard facts about Mughniyeh. He was supposed to have had facial surgery twice to disguise his features. He moved his family to the Iranian capital at the end of the Lebanese civil war in 1990 and regularly travelled between Tehran, Beirut and Damascus, allegedly using an Iranian diplomatic passport.

In the mid 1990s, the Israelis recruited a former Sunni militiaman to kill Mughniyeh in Beirut with a bomb. The assassin killed Mughniyeh’s brother, Fuad, instead. His funeral is thought to be the most recent occasion that Imad appeared in public.

Positively his final appearance, however, will take place tomorrow afternoon in southern Beirut where Hezbollah is planning a large funeral procession.