HOWZAT

“It could have been the Syrians,” Walid Jumblatt, an outspoken member of the antiSyrian March 14 parliamentary coalition, told The Times. “Damascus is well protected and I don’t think somebody else could do it.” Israel’s assassins have penetrated Damascus before, however. In September 2004 a senior commander of the Palestinian Hamas movement was killed in a similar car-bomb explosion, an act pinned on Israel.

In 1985 Mughnieh led the hijacking of a TWA airliner in Beirut in which a US navy diver was killed. 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 John McCarthy, the British journalist.

Mughnieh was born in 1962 in the southern Lebanese village of Teir Dibba. He grew up in the southern suburbs of Beirut, where, as a teenager, he joined Force 17, the elite unit of the Fatah faction led by Yassir Arafat, the Palestinian leader.

After Israeli forces expelled the Palestinians from Beirut during the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Mughnieh joined a group of Shia Islamists then coalescing under Iranian guidance in the Bekaa Valley. The group became Hezbollah, and Mughnieh, 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 lorry-bomb attacks against the US Marine barracks and the French paratroop headquarters in Beirut – acts that killed nearly 400 people.

Unlike Osama bin Laden, Mughnieh rarely gave interviews or released statements to the public. He lived in the shadows, aware that he was a target for assassination by the Americans and Israelis. In the mid1990s, the Israelis recruited a former pro-Syrian Sunni militiaman to kill Mughnieh in Beirut with a bomb. But the assassin killed his brother, Fuad, instead. Mughnieh’s other brother, Jihad, died in car-bomb assassination attempt in March 1985 against a senior Shia cleric that was later found to have been carried out by CIA-trained Lebanese agents.

Mughnieh was rumoured to have had facial surgery twice to disguise his features. He moved his family to Tehran at the end of the Lebanese civil war in 1990 and travelled between the Iranian capital, Beirut and Damascus, allegedly using an Iranian diplomatic passport and travelling on unscheduled flights.

After Hezbollah drove Israeli forces out of south Lebanon in 2000, Mughnieh is thought to have overseen the development of the group’s military wing, turning it into the formidable machine that battled Israeli forces to a standstill in the summer war of 2006.

Hezbollah, officially, has always distanced itself from Mughnieh and his alleged exploits. However, in an interview with The Times in July 2003, Nasrallah, a long-time friend of Mughnieh, said: “Haji Imad is among the best freedom fighters in the Lebanese arena. He had a very important role during the occupation [of Lebanon by Israel]. But as for his relationship with Hezbollah, we maintain the tradition of not discussing names.” The few photographs of Mughnieh in the public domain date back to the 1980s and show a serious-looking, narrow-faced young man with a sharply pointed black beard. But, with his death, al-Manar television broadcast a recent picture of him. It showed a chubby man with full beard streaked with grey, wearing wire-rimmed spectacles and dressed in a camouflage uniform.

“The man was a murderer and murdered people who had nothing to do with Lebanon,” Robert Baer, a former CIA officer who tracked Mughnieh in 1980s Beirut, told The Times. “But, at the same time, he believed he was fighting an anti-colonial war.”

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