The Assassination of Imad Mugniyah: Just Another Mossad Extrajudicial Execution?

By Delinda C. Hanley


	A Lebanese boy holds up a portrait of assassinated Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyah during his funeral procession in Beirut’s mainly Shi’i southern suburbs, Feb. 14, 2008 (AFP photo/Ramzi Haidar).

WHEN ARMED agents from the Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, infiltrated the North African city of Tunis in 1988 to kill Abu Jihad, 51, Yasser Arafat’s PLO deputy commander, ”they employed up to 4,000 men for his assassination,” wrote Robert Fisk in The Independent on April 13, 2001. Led by former Prime Minister and then-deputy military chief Ehud Barak, who waited in a warship off-shore, a Mossad death squad killed Abu Jihad’s driver, a gardener, then his bodyguard. His son remembers how “four men stepped forward to empty an entire clip of bullets from an automatic weapon into my dad—like it was a kind of ritual. Then an officer in a black mask stepped forward and shot him in the head, just to make sure.”

Noted Fisk, “Today, Israel’s murder squads come cheaper: a computer chip that activates a bomb in a mobile telephone, a family collaborator, or even a splash of ultra-violet paint on the roof of a car to alert an Israeli Apache helicopter pilot to fire a Hellfire missile into the Palestinian’s vehicle.”

Extrajudicial executions are war crimes.

Judging by B’tselem’s compilation (see box), Israel prefers using American-made Apache helicopter gunships to fire electronically guided missiles at wanted Palestinians in the occupied territories. American F-15 or F-16 fighter jets also have their uses when it comes to bombing a suspect’s home, apartment building or office. (It’s a little awkward to use gunships or jets for assassinations in other sovereign countries—unless, of course, it’s part of a full-scale invasion.)

The U.S. Arms Export Control Act stipulates that such weapons can be used only for “legitimate self-defense” and internal security. But Israel isn’t worried that Congress might freeze arms sales or U.S. military aid, which stands at about $3 billion a year.

It’s a little trickier to carry out extrajudicial executions abroad, but Mossad agents are up to the challenge. In the old days assassins often used bullets. (Fathi Shaqaqi, head of Islamic Jihad, was shot by two bikers at pointblank range on Malta in October 1995.) Today the weapon of choice is a remote-controlled explosive device, which can be detonated from miles away.

The Feb. 12 assassination of senior Hezbollah leader Imad Mugniyah, 46, in Damascus, Syria most likely was carried out by agents of Mossad. Israel has denied involvement, but they’d been trying to kill him for two decades. (His brother Fuad was killed in a 1994 Beirut car bombing and another brother, Jihad, was killed in a car-bombing assassination attempt on the life of Hezbollah founder Sheikh Fadlallah in 1985.)

According to the Sunday Times, the driver’s seat headrest in Mugniyah’s SUV was replaced with one containing an explosive device which was detonated when he entered the car. Alternatively, a Syrian investigation points to a car bomb parked nearby, also detonated by remote control.

The explosion occurred a few hundred yards away from where Hamas political leader Khaled Meshal, was meeting with Syrian intelligence officers, according to the Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot. Meshal, who must lead a charmed life, was injected with a lethal nerve toxin by two Mossad agents in Amman, Jordan in 1997. The 52-year-old father of seven survived thanks to his bodyguard, who chased and captured the Israelis, and Jordan’s King Hussein, who, in exchange for the release of the Mossad agents, demanded that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu supply the antidote and release Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the founder and spiritual leader of Hamas. (The frail quadriplegic Sheikh Yassin, in his wheelchair, was assassinated by an Israeli missile on March 22, 2004, after morning prayers in Gaza City. Israel had been unsuccessful in an earlier attack on the sheikh in September 2003.)

Mossad learned that poison isn’t foolproof, although it sure is hard to pinpoint if it works. (Many Palestinians and others in the Arab world, including Israeli writer Uri Avnery, believe that Palestinian President Yasser Arafat died of poisoning—but that’s another story.)

The similarities between the Mossad hit which killed Mugniyah and the assassination of Lebanese former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri have been noted as well. Hariri was killed in Beirut when a sophisticated remote control bomb blew up his car on Feb. 14, 2005. His murder (along with 22 others nearby) was immediately blamed on Syria.

The first question asked by any amateur detective worth his or her salt is always, “Who benefits from the crime?”

It certainly wasn’t the Syrians. Predictably, the Lebanese staged massive demonstrations that forced the Syrians to withdraw, leaving the country defenseless against its neighbor to the south. Within weeks of Syria’s exit, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, Israeli army officers began plotting a three-week campaign to attack Lebanon. Israel invaded southern Lebanon on July 12, 2006, ostensibly in retaliation for Hezbollah’s capture of two Israeli soldiers. Israel’s weeks-long bombardment killed more than a thousand people, most of them Lebanese civilians, and severely damaged Lebanon’s environment and infrastructure.

Had Hariri lived, he and his powerful friends around the world would have gone about their business rebuilding Lebanon. Before Israel’s invasion, and largely thanks to Hariri, Beirut had resumed its role as a thriving tourist and commercial hub—and Israel’s rival for business and water. Hariri, along with Syria, could have stopped Israel’s second invasion in the summer of 2006. Who benefitted from his death?

While Syria has always denied any involvement in Hariri’s assassination, Damascus agreed to help in the investigation. The man inexplicably chosen to lead the U.N. investigation was Detlev Mehlis, who led the investigation into the 1986 La Belle Discothèque bombing in West Berlin, and covered up the dubious involvement of U.S., Israeli and German intelligence. The intercepts used to convict Libya of that bombing had been concocted by Mossad (see “The Israeli Deception That Led to the Bombing of Pan American Flight 103 Over Lockerbie, Scotland,” by Richard H. Curtiss, October/November 1999 Washington Report, p. 22, and The Other Side of Deception by Victor Ostrovsky).

This latest Mehlis investigation was tainted as well. The French newspaper Le Figaro confirmed that the British MI6 and Mossad supplied much of the U.N. Commission’s intelligence and witnesses. Several key witnesses admitted to perjury, and star witness Zuhir Ibn Mohamed Said Saddik bragged of earning millions by testifying falsely against Lebanese President Emile Lahoud and Syrian President Bashar Assad.

The Hariri investigation did turn up something interesting, however. The Lebanese Army discovered several networks of Arab mercenaries trained by the Mossad to conduct terrorist attacks and car bombings in Lebanon.

In June 2006, Mahmoud Rafea was caught on camera after car bombing two members of Islamic Jihad, the Majzoub brothers. According to the June 20, 2006 Daily Star, Rafea confessed to committing the Majzoub murders with help from two Israeli Mossad agents. They “replaced a door of the brothers’ car with a booby-trapped facsimile,” he said, and left the country after an Israeli airplane “detonated the planted explosives with an electronic beam.”

According to Global Intelligence News, “Mahmoud Rafea, who was trained in Israel, also confessed to distributing bombs and ordnance to various locations around Lebanon to destabilize the country. A raid of Rafea’s home yielded high tech Israeli surveillance gear, fake passports, IDs, and appliances and baggage with secret compartments, and detailed maps of Lebanon.”

Israel’s murder squads are hard at work at home and abroad, using a lot of high-tech equipment made in America. The White House, Congress and the American press ignore or even condone this behavior. With every extrajudicial execution Israel carries out, flouting international law, Israel and its only supporter, the United States, become more hated by more people.

Delinda C. Hanley is news editor of the Washington Report.

SIDEBAR

Killing Closer to Home

According to B’tselem (the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories), since September 2000 Israel has killed 227 Palestinians in what it euphemistically terms “targeted killings.” Passersby, children, and wives killed along with—or sometimes instead of—the intended victim are referred to as “collateral damage.” (For the grisly list, see <http://www.btselem.org/English/Statistics/Casualties.asp>.)

The 227 killed are in addition to the 2,082 Palestinians who, from 2000 to our press date, had taken no part in hostilities but were killed by Israeli security forces. Nor do they include the 1,497 who were resistance fighters, and the 840 Palestinians who were slaughtered but may or may not have been combatants. Among the 227 “targeted” Palestinians living inside Israel and the occupied territories who were assassinated and executed without the fuss of a judge or jury are men like Dr. Thabet Thabet, a dentist, who had worked for Physicians for Human Rights and who was a Fatah activist.

The 227 “targeted” men do not include those assassinated by Mossad death squads in other countries. —D.C.H.