Hezbollah said Wednesday its operations chief Imad Mughniyah was killed Tuesday evening in a bomb last in a residential neighborhood of Damascus killed a senior Hezbollah military commander.

The group in a statement accused Israel of the killing.

"With all pride we declare a great jihadist leader of the Islamic resistance in Lebanon joining the martyrs ... The brother commander hajj Imad Mughinyeh became a martyr at the hands of the Zionist Israelis," said a statement carried on Hezbollah's television.
Advertisement
Mughniyah served as Hezbollah's deputy secretary general and thus the organization's No. 2 man, was responsible for the military campaign against Israel.

A Shi'ite, Mughniyah nevertheless served with Fatah in the late 1970s and afterward joined Hezbollah.

He was wanted by Israel and by the U.S. for his part in the bombings of the Israeli embassy and of Armia, the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1992 and 1994.

Mughniyah, his deputy Talal Hamiya and Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah topped Israel's list of most wanted terrorists.

He also appears on the FBI's list of most wanted terrorists and has a $25-million price on his head. According to foreign sources, Israel has tried several times to assassinate him, most notably in Beirut in 1994, when a car bomb exploded outside his brother's house.