Hezb'allah Terror Chief Assassinated

Hezbollah said Wednesday its Deputy Secretary General Imad Mughniyah was killed Tuesday evening in a bomb blast in a residential neighborhood of Damascus, accusing Israel of being behind the explosion.

"With all pride we declare a great jihadist leader of the Islamic resistance in Lebanon joining the martyrs ... The brother commander hajj Imad Mughinyah became a martyr at the hands of the Zionist Israelis," said a statement carried on Hezbollah's television.

Prime Minsiter's Office spokesman Mark Regev declined comment. "We have released no statement on this matter," he said. Mughniyah headed Hezbollah's operations branch serving in a role similar to chief of staff, and had been wanted by Israel and the United States for years due to his role in numerous bombings, hijackings and abductions in which hundreds of people were killed.

Mughniyah was indicted for the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, which killed 85 people, and was the subject of an arrest warrant for the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy there, in which 29 people died.

He was responsible for the 1985 hijacking of a TWA passenger jet, and the murder of a soldier in the U.S. navy. Four Hezbollah operatives hijacked the flight, travelling between Athens and Rome, to Beirut, beginning a 17-day ordeal in which the plane made two trips to Algeria. The hijackers killed U.S. Navy diver Robert Dean Stethem in Beirut.

He has been accused of a role in the bombings of U.S. Marines and French army barracks in Lebanon in 1983 that left more than 300 people dead.

Mughniyah is believed to be behind a 1983 bomb attack on the U.S. embassy in Beirut, in which 63 people lost their lives.

Islamic Jihad, a shadowy pro-Iranian group widely believed linked to Hezbollah, kidnapped dozens of Western hostages, including Americans, in Beirut in the mid 1980s at a time when Moughniyah was thought to be the group's commander. The group killed some of its captives and exchanged others for U.S. weapons to Iran in what was later known as the Iran-Contra scandal. Among the victims of Islamic Jihad was the CIA's Middle East station chief.