US applauds assassination of senior Hizbullah leader

US:The assassination in Damascus on Tuesday night of one of Hizbullah's most senior commanders, Imad Mugnieh, long on the US's most-wanted list for attacks on Israeli and western targets, was last night applauded by the US.

Hizbullah, which is backed by Syria and Iran, accused Israel of assassinating him by planting a bomb in his car. Tehran blamed Israel but Israel denied any involvement.

"The world is a better place without this man in it. He was a cold-blooded killer, a mass-murderer and a terrorist responsible for countless innocent lives lost," US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said. "One way or another he was brought to justice."

Mugnieh (45) was the Osama bin Laden of his day, though he was responsible for the deaths of far fewer people than the founder of al-Qaeda. I interviewed him in a dingy hotel room in Tehran on October 20th, 1991, on the periphery of an Iranian-organised international conference for the support of the Intifada.

There were five people in the room: Mugnieh, another Lebanese, a woman in a chador who interpreted, myself and Robert Fisk of the London Independent. The interpreter took notes on paper crested with a Kalashnikov and the name of Allah.

We were allowed to write that we had interviewed a member of Islamic Jihad, but were forbidden to name Mugnieh, already known in the west as the group's "mastermind". A cell within the Lebanese Hizbullah, Islamic Jihad had blown up the US marines and French paratroopers in Beirut and US and French embassies in Beirut and Kuwait. They had hijacked several aircraft, including a TWA flight in 1985 when the body of a US Navy diver was dumped on the tarmac of Beirut airport.

Mugnieh was of stocky build, with medium brown hair and beard. I best remember his eyes, which appeared dead, without light. In the days that followed, I several times felt them watching me. He would hover around the phone booths from which foreign journalists called their editors.

Islamic Jihad was behind most of the kidnappings of westerners in Lebanon in the 1980s, and we wanted to ask Mugnieh about our colleague Terry Anderson, held by the group since March 1985.

"In the name of Allah the merciful, the beneficent and with his help," Mugnieh began. Speaking slowly, as if dictating a communique, he said the West's only concern in Lebanon was the supremacy of Lebanese Christians and the security of Israel. There was, he added, an "American plan to eradicate Islamic existence and resistance to Israel in Lebanon".

When we finally managed to place our first question, about the situation of the remaining western hostages in Lebanon, Mugnieh mocked our impatience. The crisis in Lebanon was ending, he said, thanks to the intervention of then secretary general of the United Nations Javier Pérez de Cuéllar.

But what of Terry Anderson? "We treat him better than you treat yourself," Mugnieh claimed. When Anderson was freed six weeks later, he would tell us of the seven years spent in dank cells, often chained to a radiator, how he was wrapped mummy-like in masking tape to be transported in a car boot.

What did he feel about the hostages? "My feeling towards the mental pain of Terry Anderson is the same as my feeling towards the Lebanese hostages in Khiam [the prison then run by Israel and its militia allies in southern Lebanon], with the exception that the Lebanese hostages go through both mental and physical torture," Mugnieh said.

"Taking hostages is wrong," he continued. "It is an evil. But it is the only choice . . . There is no other option." Mugnieh spoke of the detention of thousands of Lebanese civilians in southern Lebanon in the Ansar prison camp and then Khiam. "I don't mean just Israel, because the 1982 invasion was financed by America, which also supplied the weapons," he said.

The CIA station chief William Buckley, whom Islamic Jihad had kidnapped, "was the de facto president of Lebanon," Mugnieh alleged. Buckley's bones were later found in a bag by the roadside in Beirut's southern suburbs.

The litany of grievances continued. The Iranian airliner that the US shot down over the Persian Gulf in 1988 "was filled with innocent men, women and children", he noted. "The US government didn't admit to having done wrong . . . They did not even pay . . . the families of the victims."

In April 1988, I had covered the hijacking of a Kuwaiti airliner to Algiers by Islamic Jihad for The Irish Times. Mugnieh is believed to have been one of the hijackers. At the end of his three-week ordeal, the flight superintendent said the worst moment was when the hijackers took over the plane. "When they look at you and hold a gun to your face . . . Have you ever seen a shark in the water? The eyes, exactly. It has no expression. A cruel face and very steady hands."

More than 16 years after I interviewed Mugnieh, I still feel certain that he was that "shark in the water".