Word: mughniyah
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Indeed, before Osama bin Laden, there was Imad Mughniyah. And his death is a serious blow to Hizballah...
...organization rarely talked in public about Mughniyah and his alleged exploits from the 1980s. Sheikh Sobhi Tufayli, a founder of Hizballah who led the organization between 1989 and 1991, once told me that Mughniyah was innocent of the charges leveled against him by the U.S. "He had nothing to do with it," the gruff cleric said, then added "Besides do you think I would tell...
...July 2003 interview, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the current Hizballah leader, told me that the U.S. accusations against Mughniyah were "just accusations." "Can they provide evidence to condemn Mughniyah?" he asked. But he added "Hajj Imad is among the best freedom fighters in the Lebanese arena. He had a very important role during the occupation [of southern Lebanon by Israel]. But as for his relationship with Hizballah, we maintain the tradition of not discussing names...
...true that the long international hunt for Mughniyah threw up many accusations about his misdeeds in the 1980s, but not much evidence has been produced to back them. Although he is alleged to have masterminded the suicide bomb spectaculars against U.S. targets in Lebanon in the mid-1980s and run the Beirut kidnapping networks that took dozens of foreigners hostage, the only crime for which he has been indicted by the U.S. is the hijacking of a TWA airliner in 1985 in which a U.S. navy diver was killed...
Indeed, such was Mughniyah's mythical status that sometimes it was not always certain if he really existed at all. "I sometimes would ask myself if Mughniyah was a real person or a figment of imagination," said Magnus Ranstorp, a Hizballah specialist at the Swedish National Defense College in Stockholm who has traced Mughniyah's activities for years. "But the intelligence agencies I was in contact with were under no illusions. He was the real deal...