A most wanted terrorist is killed

BEIRUT, Lebanon - Imad Mughniyeh, a senior but shadowy Hezbollah commander accused by the United States and Israel of masterminding suicide bombings, hijackings, hostage-takings and other violence spanning 25 years, was killed by a car bomb in the Syrian capital of Damascus, the Shiite Muslim group and others said yesterday.

Hezbollah accused Israel of carrying out the attack on Mughniyeh, an allegation Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's office denied. Israeli officials rarely confirm or deny a role in assassinations abroad.

A State Department spokesman welcomed the news of Mughniyeh's death but said he did not know who was responsible for it.

"The world is a better place without this man in it," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said. "He was a cold-blooded killer, a mass murderer, and a terrorist responsible for countless innocent lives lost. One way or another, he was brought to justice."

The elusiveness of Mughniyeh, long a target of U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies, rivaled only that of Osama bin Laden and stretched over many more years.

Until Sept. 11, 2001, the attacks for which the United States blamed Mughniyeh represented some of the deadliest strikes against Americans.

Along with bin Laden, he was included in the list of 22 "most wanted terrorists." The list was released by President Bush a month after the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Although Hezbollah has always denied any of its members had a role, the United States accused Mughniyeh of orchestrating two bombings of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut - in 1983 and 1984 - that killed 72 people.

Among the victims was Robert Ames, then the CIA's top Middle East expert. Even more devastating were the suicide truck bombings organized against U.S. Marines and French paratroopers in Beirut in October 1983. Together, those attacks killed 300 people.

Israel accused Mughniyeh, 45, of masterminding the 1994 bombing of a Jewish center in Buenos Aires that killed 87 people and of a role in the 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy in the Argentine capital that killed 28. He was wanted by the authorities there.

"With pride and honor, we announce the martyrdom of a great resistance leader who joined the procession of martyrs in the Islamic resistance," said a statement read on al-Manar, Hezbollah's television station, and published on its Web site. "The martyr, may his soul rest in peace, has been a target of the Zionists for more than 20 years."

Syria had no comment. Its authoritarian government prides itself on the internal security it maintains in Damascus, the tightly controlled seat of government.

Bruce Riedel, a former CIA Middle East analyst who is now at the Brookings Institution's Saban Center, said the fact that Mughniyeh was killed by a car bomb in downtown Damascus limited the possibilities.

The Israelis "have done it before in downtown Damascus," Riedel said. "He was also very much on their radar screen."

Riedel said Hezbollah would almost certainly seek to retaliate for Mughniyeh's death, giving whoever was behind it incentive to deny involvement.

"Some kind of retaliation is almost certain and for killing Mughniyeh, one of Hezbollah's founding architects, will be very serious," he said.

Al-Alam, the Iranian-owned Arabic-language television station, broadcast grainy footage of the car-bombing scene from the upscale neighborhood of Kafar Sousah in Damascus, near an Iranian school, a police station, and an office for Syrian intelligence.

It showed an ambulance and people milling around the site, although the targeted car was not visible. News agencies reported that the vehicle was a new Mitsubishi Pajero.

Mughniyeh's elusiveness over the years had given him a ghostlike aura. His whereabouts were always the matter of speculation - in the southern Lebanese village of Teir Dibba, where he was born to peasant parents, or somewhere in Iran, whose government had reputedly issued him a diplomatic passport.

Few pictures of him existed, and he was said to have undergone plastic surgery more than once to conceal his identity.

After announcing his death, al-Manar broadcast what appeared to be a recent picture of Mughniyeh. It showed a burly man with glasses dressed in green military camouflage and a green baseball cap. He had a beard, streaked with gray.

Mughniyeh's name emerged after the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which was then mired in civil war. He was reputed to be the commander of Islamic Jihad, a pro-Iran group widely believed to be linked to Hezbollah, which had yet to formally emerge.

He was blamed for kidnapping many of the more than 50 Americans, Frenchmen, Britons, Germans and other foreigners held during the civil war's grimmest days.

One of the most prominent hostages was William Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beirut, who was seized in March 1984. He was tortured by his Lebanese and Iranian interrogators and died in captivity, apparently from lack of medical attention.

In March 1985, the Associated Press' chief Mideast correspondent, Terry Anderson, was kidnapped. He was held captive for more than six years.

Mughniyeh was indicted for his role in the hijacking of a TWA flight from Athens to Rome in 1985. The hijackers killed a U.S. Navy diver after taking the plane to Beirut.

The United States had offered a $25 million reward for his capture or conviction.

His name emerged again in 2006, when he reportedly played a role in organizing Hezbollah's defenses during the war with Israel that year.

Over the years, both Israeli and U.S. intelligence agencies relentlessly pursued him.

In 1994, his brother was killed by a car bomb in Beirut, and reports at the time suggested Imad Mughniyeh was the actual target.

A year later, FBI officials traveled to Saudi Arabia to take custody of him during a stopover of a Middle East Airlines flight from Khartoum, Sudan, to Beirut. Before they could, Saudi officials decided not to cooperate and refused to allow the plane to land, angering U.S. officials.