NOTHING seemed very remarkable about the short, bearded man who mingled with other guests on Tuesday evening at a reception in Damascus, the Syrian capital, to mark the 29th anniversary of Ayatollah KhomeiniÂ’s Iranian revolution. Yet before the night was over he was dead in the twisted wreckage of his car and the inevitable assumption was that Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence service, had killed him with an ingeniously planted bomb.
The news spread rapidly that the dead man was Imad Mughniyeh, an elusive figure known as “the Fox” who had been one of the world’s most feared terrorist masterminds.
Robert Baer, a former CIA agent who spent years on his trail, said Mughniyeh was “probably the most intelligent, most capable operative we’ve ever run across”.
There has been all sorts of speculation about this, but know the lion by his claw:
This kind of device, a bomb placed in an innocuous object close to the targetÂ’s head, is almost a Mossad trademark.
If this had been some sort of inter-terrorist squabble, the bombers would have put a massive charge in a nearby vehicle and detonated it without caring how many others were killed.
Israel has to deny this publicly for various reasons but they want the terrorists to know.