Imad Mughnieh, a top Hezbollah commander linked to notorious attacks against Western and Israeli targets in the 1980s and 1990s, was killed in a car bombing in Syria, the Shia militant group announced on Wednesday.
It said Mughnieh, a shadowy figure in the world of terrorism and on America's most wanted list for more than 20 years, died late Tuesday in the Syrian capital Damascus in an attack orchestrated by Israel. "A great jihadist from the Islamic resistance in Lebanon has become a martyr," the Syrian- and Iranian-backed Hezbollah said in a statement. "Haj Imad Mughnieh died a martyr at the hands of the Israeli Zionists."
In Jerusalem, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's office denied Israel was behind the killing. "Israel rejects any attempt by terrorist organisations to attribute to it any implication in this affair," it said in a statement.
Washington openly welcomed his death. "The world is a better place without this man in it," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters. "He was a cold-blooded killer." Senior Israeli figures also welcomed news of Mughnieh's death, while the news media were quick to predict that Hezbollah would attempt to carry out revenge attacks against Israeli targets.
Mughnieh, 45, nicknamed "the fox" for managing to elude capture, allegedly masterminded a string of attacks against US and Israeli targets, including the abduction of Western hostages in Lebanon in the 1980s and the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires that killed 29 people.
He was also linked to the bombing of the US marine barracks at Beirut airport in 1983, in which 241 American servicemen died and the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 in 1985, in which a US navy diver was killed.
After the hijacking to Beirut, the United States offered a reward of up to five million dollars for information leading to Mughnieh's arrest. Western intelligence services suspected him of working directly for Iranian intelligence and he was on the US State Department's list of most wanted terrorism suspects.