When a man died in a bomb explosion late last night in Damascus, Syrian police kept media and other onlookers well away from the scene of the blast in the affluent Kfar Soussa district.
Syrian media, all of which falls under the direct or partial control of the regime, still hasn’t mentioned the incident, but Hezbollah’s al-Manar TV station in Lebanon today confirmed that the dead man is Imad Mughniyeh, one of their top commanders and one of the world’s most wanted terrorists.
(FBI archive photo of Mughniyeh, before one of his many plastic surgeries)
Among the crimes Mughniyeh masterminded:
* The 1983 suicide bombings in Beirut that killed over 300 US marines and French troops.
* The 1985 hijacking of a TWA airliner in which a U.S. Navy diver was killed.
* A wave of Western hostage-taking in Lebanon in the 1980s.
* The 1992 bombing of Israel’s embassy in Argentina in which 29 people were murdered.
* The 1994 bombing of the Buenos Aires Jewish center in which 95 people died, including Holocaust survivors. (In reporting Mughniyeh’s death this morning, the BBC refused to call the Buenos Aires bombing of elderly Jews “terrorism” and merely referring to it as “an act of violence.”)
The left-wing Israeli paper Ha’aretz, today called Mughniyeh The epitome of the “Axis of Evil”.
Mughniyeh had been in hiding for years and had undergone several rounds of plastic surgery to disguise his appearance. In recent years, he established links with Osama bin Laden despite the Sunni-Shia heritage of their respective terror groups.
Hezbollah has blamed Israel for assassinating Mughniyeh. Israel has not denied it.