Imad Mughniyeh has been killed in an explosion in Damascus, Syria. Often referred to as Osama Bin Laden's role model, Hezbollah's top military commander started out as a body guard for Yassar Arafat. He was the first terrorist to stage simultaneous bombings — at the U.S Marine barracks and the French army barracks, in Beirut in 1983. Mughniyeh was behind the 1985 hijacking of a TWA passenger jet in which U.S. Navy diver Robert Stethem was killed. The list goes on, Haaretz has more.

Hezbollah's TV station, Al-Mansar, interrupted its usual program to broadcast news of Mughniyeh's death, blaming the "Zionist Israelis." From the Times of London:

“With all due pride, we declare a great jihadist leader of the Islamic Resistance in Lebanon joining the martyrs . . . The brother commander hajj Imad Mughniyeh became a martyr at the hands of the Zionist Israelis,” said a statement carried by Hezbollah’s Al-Manar television channel. The station broke off normal programming to broadcast verses from the Koran. 

TIME Magazine's Middle East Blog wonders if the "CIA, or some other American intelligence agency finally do Mughniyeh in?"

As Robert Baer, who hunted Mughniyeh for years as a CIA officer, describes Mughniyeh, “He is the most dangerous terrorist we’ve ever faced. He is probably the most intelligent, most capable operative we’ve ever run across, including the KGB or anybody else. He enters by one door, exits by another, changes his cars daily, never makes appointments on a telephone, never is predictable. He only uses people that are related to him that he can trust. He doesn’t just recruit people. He is the master terrorist, the grail that we have been after since 1983." 

Israel has elevated the alert on its Lebanese and Syrian borders, with its airlines, embassies and Jewish institutions world wide.

In September 2001, Jane's magazine profiled Mughniyeh, offering an "alternative view" that he was responsible for 9/11 with Ayman Al Zawahiri and some assistance from Iraq's Intelligence Service, SSO. Jane's reported this little known airline plot. 

"On April 12th 1997, he was reported to be only two hours away from achieving the highest goal of any terrorist organisation (until last week): blowing up an Israeli El-Al airliner above Tel Aviv. A man carrying a forged British passport with the name Andrew Jonathan Neumann was in a Jerusalem hotel preparing a bomb he was supposed to take on board an El-Al flight leaving Israel, when it accidentally went off. Andrew Jonathan Neumann was very badly injured but strong enough to reveal later to the Israelis that he was not British but Lebanese, and that his operation was supposed to be a special "gift" to Israel from Imad Mughniyeh."  

Meir Javedanfar, an Iranian-born Middle East analyst, writing for Pajamas Media, provides this photograph of Mughniyeh (not previously circulated) as well as some interesting commentary.  

"The assassination of Imad Mughniyah, Iran’s top man in Syria and Lebanon, should set off alarm bells in Tehran. His assassination, according to Iranian media sources, took place in the Kafarsoose neighborhood of Damascus, close to an Iranian school and the headquarters of the Syrian Mukhabarat (intelligence agency)."

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