Imad Mughniyeh, a top commander of the Iran- and Syria-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, was killed in a car bombing in Damascus. Mr. Mughniyeh was linked to some of the worst terrorist attacks of the last three decades.
They include the simultaneous truck bombings in Beirut in 1983 that killed two-hundred forty-one U.S. Marines and fifty-eight French paratroopers. Mr. Mughniyeh was also responsible for the kidnappings in the 1980s of dozens of Westerners – French, British, Swiss, Germans, and Americans -- in Lebanon.
In the 1990s, Mr. Mughniyeh orchestrated two car bomb attacks in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The first, at the Israeli Embassy, killed twenty-nine people; the second, at a Jewish community center, resulted in the death of eighty-five Argentineans and wounded hundreds of others.
In 2007, the international police agency Interpol, at the request of the government of Argentina, listed Mr. Mughniyeh as one of those wanted in the attack on the Jewish community center. Five Iranians, including a former Iranian intelligence minister, a former head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps, and a Revolutionary Guard Corp general were also listed by Interpol in connection with that terrorist attack.
Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki traveled to Beirut for Mr. Mughniyeh’s funeral. At the ceremony, he read a letter from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad hailing the Hezbollah terrorist as a martyr.
U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack described Imad Mughniyeh more accurately:
“He was a cold-blooded killer, a mass murderer, and a terrorist responsible for countless innocent lives lost...The world is a better place without this man in it.”
No one has claimed responsibility for Mr. Mughniyeh’s death. Mr. McCormack said, “One way or another, he was brought to justice.”
