Israel denied having a hand in the assassination of Hezbollah’s military commander but former intelligence chiefs and political leaders could barely keep the smiles off their faces at the abrupt demise of one of the world’s most wanted terrorists.

Fingers across the Middle East were pointing at Israel after the Damascus bomb attack that killed Imad Mughnieh, described by some Israeli analysts as even more dangerous than Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the head of the Shia militant movement.

A statement from the office of Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minister, denied any knowledge of the attack deep in the heart of the highly policed Syrian capital. “Israel is . . . learning for the first time the details being reported in the media in the past few hours,” it said. “Israel rejects the attempt by terror groups to attribute to it any involvement in this incident.”

Danny Yatom, the former head of Mossad, the Israeli overseas spy network, said: “Mughnieh was one of the most dangerous and cruel terrorists of all time.” Mr Yatom said that there had been “numerous intelligence agencies and countries that have been pursuing him, and the one that was successful in reaching him [had proved itself] to have a high intelligence and operational capability.”

Yoram Schweitzer, an expert on Hezbollah at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, said it was possible that the assassination had been carried out by the Americans, French or even rival Lebanese factions. He said that the United States in particular had been on Mughnieh’s trail for a long time as part of the War on Terror. Mr Yatom said that the attack had dealt a serious blow to Hezbollah, showing that someone had managed to penetrate deep into the ultra-secretive organisation, and added that it would take a long time for it to find an heir.

In Washington a State Department spokesman said: “The world is a better place without this man in it.”

Israeli and American enthusiasm for the killing was matched by outrage from Iran, a key sponsor of Hezbollah, and from the Palestinian militant movement Hamas in Gaza.

Muhammad Ali Hosseini, the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman, described Mughniyeh’s brutal life as “a golden page in the history of mankind’s fight against the aggressive and occupying Zionists” and called his death “a clear result and example of organised state terrorism by the Zionist regime.” In Gaza City, Sami Abu Zuhri, a spokeman for Hamas, accused Mossad of carrying out the assassination. He called on the Muslim world to “face up to this Zionist octopus whose crimes are now passing beyond the Palestinian territories”.

A history of violence

April 18, 1983
Mughnieh planned and supervised the bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, which killed 63 people. A 2,000lb bomb concealed in a van was detonated in front of the building, triggering the collapse of the roof. Seventeen of the dead were American including one journalist and three aid workers. The attack wiped out entire CIA Middle East contingent

October 23, 1983
Twin suicide bombings of the US Marine Corps and French paratrooper barracks in Beirut. A lorry laden with gas-enhanced explosives destroyed the US barracks and killed 241 people, many from the same town, Jacksonville, South Carolina. Fifty-eight French paratroopers were killed later that day in a similar attack

1980’s kidnappings
Mughnieh orchestrated a series of kidnappings including those of the Britons John McCarthy and Terry Waite in an attempt to secure the release of the “Kuwait 17”, responsible for a bombing campaign in the emirate. One was his brother-in-law. Waite was held for just under five years and McCarthy for more than five

March 16, 1984
William Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beirut, was abducted in an operation masterminded by Mughnieh. He was held for 15 months, during which he was tortured and interrogated, before he succumbed to pneumonia and died

June 14, 1985
TWA flight 847 was hijacked flying from Athens to Rome. The hijackers identified and beat the US navy diver Robert Stethem, shot him and dumped his body on the tarmac. They held the 153 passengers and crew hostage, some for more than two weeks

March 17, 1992
Bombing of Israeli Embassy in 1992 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Twenty-nine people were killed including embassy staff and Argentinean passers-by

July 18, 1994
Eighty-six people died when a van packed with explosives was driven into a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires. The seven-storey building was totally destroyed

Sources: beirut-memorial.org; Defense Technical Information Centre; Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs

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