Imad Mugniyah

Imad Mugniyah (1962-2008), killed by a car bomb in Damascus, Syria on December 13, 2008, was linked to several militant Islamist terrorist groups. The Council on Foreign Relations linked him to Hezbollah, and described him as the most wanted terrorist in the world until Osama bin Laden entered the field.

Robert Baer believes he was strongly connected to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, and may have conducted the 1983 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut, as well as being involved with hostage-taking in Beirut. The Jamestown Foundation also believed in an Iranian connection as well as Hezbollah activity.

The U.S. had indicted him for participation in the TWA Flight 847 hijacking and offered a $5 million reward.

Background
According to the Jamestown Foundation, he was born in Tayr Dibbuth near Tyre in southern Lebanon, in the extended family of extended family of Sheikh Muhammed Jawad Mugniyah, a prominent Lebanese cleric of the Musawi clan. He was 13 when the 1975 Lebanese Civil War started and he joined al-Fatah, staying a member until 1982. During Imad's childhood, his family moved to the Bir al-Abed section of Beirut and he was barely a teenager of 13 years when Lebanon's civil war broke out in 1975 (The Jerusalem Report, August 22, 1991). Recruited into Fatah's Force 17, he probably first learned about explosives from his later brother-in-law, Mustafa Badr al-Din.