Hezbollah leader killed in Syria

kida

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A Hezbollah commander suspected in some of the deadliest terrorist attacks of the last 25 years and a reputed role model for Osama bin Laden has been killed in Syria, Hezbollah TV said Wednesday.

Imad Mughniyeh died in an explosion in a residential section of the Syrian capital, Damascus, said Hezbollah's television station, Al-Manar.

Hezbollah blamed Israel for Mughniyeh's death, but Israeli officials denied involvement.
"Israel rejects the attempt by terrorist elements to ascribe to it any involvement whatsoever in this incident," Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in a statement.

Intelligence sources described Mughniyeh as one of the craftiest and deadliest terrorists in the world who managed to elude capture for decades by changing his appearance and covering his footsteps.

Western intelligence agencies long suspected Mughniyeh in the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, that killed 63 people, according to a 2001 CNN report. He also was suspected in the truck bombing that year of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, an attack that killed 241 people and preceded the U.S. military withdrawal from Lebanon.

Before the September 11 terrorist attacks, U.S. officials had blamed Mughniyeh for the deaths of more Americans around the world than any other terror suspect, CNN reported in 2001. A month after the attacks in the U.S., the FBI debuted its Most Wanted Terrorists list with Mughniyeh on it.

Mughniyeh was not suspected of involvement in 9/11, but he was a role model for bin Laden, who used the 1983 Marine barracks bombing as a standard, CNN terrorism analyst Peter Bergen said.

"Because if you think about the attack, pretty much immediately afterward President Reagan ordered the United States out of Lebanon, and so that's the model bin Laden wanted to implement everywhere -- attack the United States in places like Yemen or in Kenya, or in
Tanzania, or even the United States itself, and it will pull out of the Middle East," Bergen said.

Authorities blamed Mughniyeh for the June 14, 1985, hijacking of TWA Flight 847, which gripped the attention of TV viewers around the world for more than two weeks.
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In related news:
A senior Taliban commander was captured after being seriously wounded in western Pakistan yesterday, the second big militant catch in two weeks.


Mansoor Dadullah, a former Taliban commander for southern Afghanistan, was captured in a gunfight near Zhob, in Baluchistan province. He was "critically wounded" the army said.
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Today is not a good day to be a terrorist.
 
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