Arrest Warrants and Attempted Assassination
Various law enforcement agencies attempted to capture Mughniyah. The United States tried to secure his capture in France in 1986, but were thwarted by French refusal to detain him.
The United States tried to capture him several times afterwards, beginning with a 1995 operation that was put in place after it was realized Mughniyah was flying a Middle East Airlines charter flight A-310 Airbus from Khartoum to Beirut after a meeting with several militant leaders, and was scheduled to make a stop-over in Saudi Arabia. But Saudi airport officials refused to allow the plane to make its stop-over, thwarting American bids to arrest Mughniyah.
The next year, U.S. military personnel planned to seize him off a ship in Doha, Qatar, but the operation was called off. This plan, dubbed Operation RETURN OX, was carried out by ships and sailors of Amphibious Squadron Three (USS ''Tarawa'', USS ''Duluth'', USS ''Rushmore''), Marines of the 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit, and Navy SEALs assigned to the U.S. Fifth Fleet. The operation was underway, but was canceled at the last minute when it could not be verified that Mughniyah was actually on board the Pakistani ship.
On 10 October 2001, Mughniyah appeared on the initial list of the FBI's top 22 Most Wanted Terrorists, which was released to the public by President Bush, with a reward of up to $5 million offered for information leading to his arrest. This reward remained outstanding as of 2006.
The Israeli government made several alleged attempts to assassinate Mughniyah. His brother Fuad Mugniyah was killed in a 1994 Beirut car bombing. (Another brother, Jihad, was killed in a car-bombing assassination attempt on the life of Hezbollah founder Sheikh Fadlallah in 1985, this one rumored to be the work of the CIA via the South Lebanese Army.) The New Yorker magazine suggested that Mugniyah attended a meeting between Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. He was there representing Hezbollah in Lebanon. Mugniyah had been informed that he was at the top of a US military and CIA assassination list. For this reason, he was said to avoid certain areas of Beirut for fear of being killed by CIA operators.
Read more about this topic: Imad Mughniyah
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