Chowrangi

Imad Mughniyeh, top military leader of Lebanease Hezbollah and labelled as Osama Bin Laden of 1980’s, was killed on Tuesday night by a car bomb blast in Damascus, Syria.

Imad Mughniyeh’s Profile (from IHT):

AGE: 45. Born Dec. 7, 1962 in Tair Debba, Lebanon.

MILITANT HISTORY: As a high-school dropout, he first took up arms as a teenager when he joined the Palestine Liberation Organization in Beirut. He left the PLO in 1982 and joined Hezbollah, which was founded that year. He rose in the ranks of the group to become the Hezbollah’s chief security officer and is accused of being involved in several deadly hijackings and car bombings. He is also suspected of masterminding the attacks on the U.S. Embassy and U.S. Marine barracks that killed hundreds of Americans in Lebanon in the 1980s. He is believed to have undergone plastic surgery and spent his last years moving between Lebanon, Iran, Syria and Turkey using fake passports.

FAMILY: His brother Jihad was killed along with 74 people in a car bombing in 1985 in southern Beirut. In 1994, another brother, Fuad, was killed when a booby-trapped car blew up in the southern suburb of Beirut. In 1983, he married a cousin, Saada Badreddin. The couple have a daughter, Fatima, born in 1984, and a son, Mustafa, born in 1987. He is reported to have broken off contact with them.

LAST SIGHTING: Last reported public appearance was at his brother’s funeral in 1994. Hezbollah’s television station showed a rare picture of him on Wednesday.

Imad Mughniyeh was considered as pioneer of suicide-bombing strategy. He has effectively used suicide bombers in April 1983 bombing of US Embassy in Beirut and, six months later, the twin suicide truck bomb attacks against the US Marine barracks and the French paratroop headquarters in Beirut, altogether killing nearly 400 people.

In March 1992, the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires was blown up, killing 29 people, in an operation said to have been planned by Mughniyeh. The bombing was claimed by Islamic Jihad in retaliation for Israel’s assassination a month earlier of the Hezbollah leader Sheikh Abbas Mussawi.

He is also alleged to have run the networks of kidnappers who snatched dozens of foreigners in Beirut in the mid to late 1980s, including Terry Waite, the former envoy to the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the British journalist John McCarthy.

Unlike Osama bin Laden, with whom he is sometimes compared, Mughniyeh never gave interviews nor released statements to the public. He lived in the shadows, aware that he was targeted for assassination by the Americans and Israelis.

Rumours covered for the absence of hard facts about Mughniyeh. He was supposed to have had facial surgery twice to disguise his features. He moved his family to the Iranian capital at the end of the Lebanese civil war in 1990 and regularly traveled between Tehran, Beirut and Damascus, allegedly using an Iranian diplomatic passport.

In the mid 1990s, the Israelis recruited a former Sunni militiaman to kill Mughniyeh in Beirut with a bomb. The assassin killed Mughniyeh’s brother, Fuad, instead. His funeral is thought to be the most recent occasion that Imad appeared in public.

Positively his final appearance, however, will take place tomorrow afternoon in southern Beirut where Hezbollah is planning a large funeral procession.

Meanwhile, United States welcomed the death of Imad Mughniyeh

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