1. Imad Mughniyeh is believed to have been Hezbollah's chief of staff and overseer of its military, intelligence, and security apparatus.
45 Facts About Imad Mughniyeh
1. 2.
Imad Mughniyeh has been described as a skilled military tactician and a highly elusive figure.
3.
Imad Mughniyeh was often referred to as an 'untraceable ghost'.
4.
US and Israeli officials say Mughniyeh was directly and personally involved in terrorist attacks and the mastermind of many suicide bombings, murders, kidnappings, and assassinations.
5.
Imad Mughniyeh formed Unit 121 as Hezbollah's covert assassination squad and he was behind the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing and 1983 United States embassy bombing, in which over 350 people were killed, as well as the kidnapping of dozens of foreigners in Lebanon in the 1980s.
6.
Imad Mughniyeh was indicted in Argentina for his role in the 1992 Israeli embassy attack in Buenos Aires.
7.
The highest-profile attacks he was involved in occurred in the early 1980s when Imad Mughniyeh was in his early twenties.
8.
Imad Mughniyeh was known by his nom de guerre Al-Hajj Radwan.
9.
Imad Mughniyeh was included in the European Union's list of wanted terrorists and had a US$5 million bounty on the FBI Most Wanted Terrorists list.
10.
Imad Mughniyeh was born in the village of Tayr Dibba, near Tyre, on 7 December 1962 to a peasant family of Lebanon's southern Shi'a heartland.
11.
Imad Mughniyeh was mistakenly thought to be the son of Jawad Mughniyeh, a religious cleric.
12.
CIA South Group records state that Imad Mughniyeh lived in Ayn Al-Dilbah in South Beirut.
13.
Imad Mughniyeh was discovered by fellow Lebanese Ali Abu Hassan Deeb and quickly rose through the ranks of the movement.
14.
Imad Mughniyeh temporarily left Fatah in 1981 due to differences of opinion on the regime of Saddam Hussein.
15.
Imad Mughniyeh was forced to leave Fatah after armed confrontations with Ba'th activists.
16.
Imad Mughniyeh accompanied Ayatollah Fadlallah on a Hajj pilgrimage in 1980 and thus earned his Hajj title.
17.
Imad Mughniyeh was briefly a student in the engineering department at the American University of Beirut.
18.
Imad Mughniyeh was wounded in the fighting in West Beirut.
19.
Imad Mughniyeh remained a Fatah member during this period but worked the leftist Lebanese National Movement and Islamic resistance groups.
20.
Imad Mughniyeh remained committed to the Palestine cause throughout his life and founded Hezbollah's secret "Committee for Elimination of Israel" in 2000.
21.
Imad Mughniyeh worked as the chief security for Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, a Shiia cleric and a spiritual mentor to many in Lebanon's Shi'a community, whose political consciousness was on the rise.
22.
In 1983, Imad Mughniyeh married his cousin, Saada Badr Al Din, who is the sister of Mustafa Badreddine.
23.
Imad Mughniyeh married an Iranian woman, Wafaa Imad Mughniyeh, with whom he lived in Damascus.
24.
Imad Mughniyeh enters by one door, exits by another, changes his cars daily, never makes appointments on a telephone, never is predictable.
25.
Imad Mughniyeh only uses people that are loyal to him that he can fully trust.
26.
Imad Mughniyeh had an important role during the occupation [of southern Lebanon by Israel] by 2000.
27.
Imad Mughniyeh was accused of planning and organising the 23 October 1983 truck bombings against French paratroopers and the US Marine barracks, attacks which killed 60 French soldiers and 240 Marines.
28.
US and Israeli officials have alleged that Imad Mughniyeh was involved in numerous kidnappings of Americans in Beirut during the 1980s, most notably the kidnapping of Terry Anderson, Terry Waite, and William Francis Buckley, who was the CIA station chief in Beirut.
29.
On 30 September 1985, Imad Mughniyeh allegedly organised the kidnapping of four diplomats from the Soviet Embassy in Beirut, one of whom he personally killed.
30.
Imad Mughniyeh was formally charged by Argentina for his alleged involvement on 17 March 1992 bombings of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, which killed 29, and of the AMIA cultural building in July 1994, killing 85 people.
31.
Israeli officials accuse Imad Mughniyeh of orchestrating the October 2000 capture of three IDF soldiers in northern Israel, and of the kidnapping of IDF colonel Elchanan Tenenbaum.
32.
In 2002, Imad Mughniyeh was linked to the Karine A incident in which the Palestinian Authority was accused of importing fifty tons of weapons.
33.
Imad Mughniyeh was a member of Force 17, an armed branch of the Fatah movement charged with providing security for Yasser Arafat and other prominent PLO officials.
34.
Imad Mughniyeh reportedly controlled Hezbollah's security apparatus, the Special Operations Command, which handles intelligence and conducts overseas terrorist acts.
35.
However, Imad Mughniyeh was a member of Hezbollah's jihadist council until his death in February 2008.
36.
The United States tried to capture him several times afterward, beginning with a 1995 US special forces Delta Force operation that was put in place after the CIA was tipped off that Imad Mughniyeh was flying a Middle East Airlines charter flight Airbus A310 from Khartoum to Beirut after a meeting with several Hezbollah leaders, and was scheduled to make a stop-over in Saudi Arabia.
37.
The operation was underway, but was cancelled at the last minute when it could not be fully verified that Imad Mughniyeh was on board the Pakistani ship.
38.
On 10 October 2001, Imad Mughniyeh 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 $15 million offered for information leading to his arrest.
39.
Jeffrey Goldberg suggested that Imad Mughniyeh, representing Hezbollah in Lebanon, attended a high-level meeting between Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
40.
Imad Mughniyeh was killed on 12 February 2008 by a car bomb blast at around 23:00 in the Kafr Sousa neighborhood of Damascus, Syria.
41.
Imad Mughniyeh left the party shortly after 22:30 and walked to his Mitsubishi Pajero.
42.
Israel officially denied being behind the killing, but Imad Mughniyeh reportedly had been a target of Mossad assassination attempts since the 1990s.
43.
Imad Mughniyeh's body was taken to Beirut and buried in Rawdat al-Shahidain Cemetery.
44.
The assassination of Imad Mughniyeh was condemned in some parts of the world.
45.
Imad Mughniyeh was a coldblooded killer, a mass murderer and a terrorist responsible for countless innocent lives lost.