Word: mughniyah
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...secret who holds Terry Anderson. Imad Mughniyah is his name. He is a 38-year-old Lebanese leader of the Shi'ite fundamentalist group Hizballah whose history of terrorism is grislier than the record of Palestinian renegade Abu Nidal. Mughniyah's villainy, U.S. officials say, runs from bombings, like the suicide attacks on the U.S. embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut, to hijackings. He is a prime suspect in the U.S. for his alleged role in the 1985 skyjacking of TWA Flight 847 in which a Navy diver was murdered. And he has made a specialty of kidnaping: U.S. officials...
...grandson of a Shi'ite mullah, Mughniyah trained with Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization. A high school dropout, he excelled at terrorism; his boldness and quick grasp of explosives and weaponry impressed his commanders. But he fell out with Fatah leaders and in 1982, when Israeli troops invaded Lebanon and occupied his village, Teir Debbe, Mughniyah joined the newly formed and more radical Hizballah (Party of God). He took to wearing religious garb even as he recruited activists and professionals to the Shi'ite cause. He rose quickly to the top of the organization...
...ites in Lebanon and to vent his hatred of the U.S. and Israel. But U.S. sources say he has become obsessed with trying to secure the freedom of his brother-in-law Mustafa Badreddin and 16 other Shi'ites jailed in Kuwait after a 1983 bombing blitz. Mughniyah launched his subsequent kidnaping and hijacking spree to spring the 17 in a prisoners-for-hostages swap. Among his victims: William Buckley, the CIA station chief, who died in captivity...
...Mughniyah reportedly gets his financing from Tehran, and is considered Iran's man in Lebanon; his closest mentors there include conservative leaders locked in rivalry with Iran's would-be pragmatists. Even so, Mughniyah has been forced to free numerous American, French and West German hostages when it served Iran's interests, while his personal demands have never been...
...Britain intelligence officials believe they have identified the man holding Terry Waite, the Anglican envoy kidnaped 20 months ago while trying to negotiate the release of other hostages. He is Imad Mughniyah, Hizballah's head of security, whose brother-in-law Mustafa Youssef Badreddin is one of the Shi'ite terrorists serving prison terms in Kuwait...