Allegations
Mughniyah was accused of terrorist attacks in the 1980s and 1990s, primarily against American and Israeli targets. These allegations include the 18 April 1983 bombing of the United States embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, which killed 63 people including 17 Americans. Agreement is not universal on Mughniyah's involvement as Caspar Weinberger, the Secretary of Defense at the time, told PBS in 2001, "We still do not have the actual knowledge of who did the bombing of the Marine barracks at the Beirut Airport, and we certainly didn't then."
Mughniyeh was fingered as the mastermind of the 23 October 1983 simultaneous truck bombings against French paratroopers and the U.S. Marine barracks, attacks which killed 58 French soldiers and 241 Marines. On 20 September 1984, he is alleged to have attacked the US embassy annex building. The United States indicted him (and his collaborator, Hassan Izz al-Din) for the 14 June 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847, which resulted in the death of U.S. Navy diver Robert Stethem. He was also linked to numerous kidnappings of Westerners in Beirut through the 1980s, most notably that of Terry Anderson, Terry Waite, and William Francis Buckley, who was the CIA station chief in Beirut. Some of these individuals were later killed, such as Buckley, who was hideously tortured and eventually murdered. The remainder were released at various times with the last one, Terry Anderson, released in 1991. It is also believed that he took advantage of his status as a student in the American University of Beirut (AUB) to enable him to assassinate Malcolm Kerr, president of the AUB, on campus in 1984. His stay at AUB as an engineering student was financed by a political organisation. Mugniyah has also been tied to the Khobar Towers bombing in 1996, which killed 19 Americans and one Saudi citizen.
On 30 September 1985, Mughniyeh allegedly organized the kidnapping of four diplomats from the Soviet Embassy in Beirut, one of whom he soon personally killed. The result of this kidnapping was Soviet pressure on Syria to stop its operations in Northern Lebanon in exchange for release of the remaining three hostages. On 8 March 1985, the CIA carried out a reprisal operation funded by the Saudis, for the Marine barracks bombing of 1983, in which they attempted to kill Fadlallah by car-bombing. The cleric escaped harm, but the huge explosion wounded 200 and killed 62 in the poor Shi'a neighbourhood where he lived. Among the deads were Imad Mughniya's brother and some of Fadlallah's bodyguards and close friends. Roger Morris claims that this was a "turning point" in Mughniyeh's life and that it was after this event that he "joined the terrorist arm of the increasingly militant political impulse among Lebanon's Shi'ah from which Hezbollah soon emerged, and as the resistance movement's chief of security and intelligence, he joined one of history's more vicious chain reactions."
Mughniyah was formally charged by Argentina with participating in the 17 March 1992 bombings of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, which killed 29 and the AMIA cultural building in July 1994, killing 86 people. He has also been accused of orchestrating the 2000 capture of three Israeli soldiers in the northern part of Israel and the kidnapping of Israeli businessman Elchanan Tenenbaum, and of killing eight soldiers and abducting two in the 2006 Lebanon War.
While the long international hunt for Mughniyah produced many allegations, they were denied or dismissed by Hezbollah. In a July 2003 interview, Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah told Time Magazine that the US accusations against Mughniyah were "just accusations," and he questioned whether they could provide evidence to condemn Mughniyah. Nasrallah also stated that, "Hajj Imad is among the best freedom fighters in the Lebanese arena. He had a very important role during the occupation . But as for his relationship with Hezbollah, we maintain the tradition of not discussing names."
According to Robert Baer, "Mughniyah is probably the most intelligent, most capable operative we’ve ever run across, including the KGB or anybody else. He enters by one door, exits by another, changes his cars daily, never makes appointments on a telephone, never is predictable. He only uses people that are related to him that he can trust. He doesn’t just recruit people." He has been described as "tall, slender, well-dressed and handsome ... penetrating eyes," speaking some English but better French.
Read more about this topic: Imad Mughniyah