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Senior commander of Hezbollah killed in Syria bombing

A senior Hezbollah commander on the US' most wanted list was killed in a car bombing in Syria that the militant group blamed on Israel, an accusation the Jewish state neither confirmed nor denied.

Imad Mughnieh, who headed Hezbollah's special operations unit, died in a car bombing in a residential neighborhood of the Syrian capital late on Tuesday, Hezbollah officials said.

Syrian state television reported only that one person had died in the bombing without identifying the victim, but a Syrian human rights watchdog confirmed that it was Mughnieh who had died and accused Israel of an act of "terrorism."

"A great jihadist from the Islamic resistance in Lebanon has become a martyr," Hezbollah said in a statement. "Haj Imad Mughnieh died a martyr at the hands of the Israeli Zionists."

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's office declined to comment on the claims by Hezbollah.

"We are not making any comment," Olmert spokesman Mark Regev said.

But senior Israeli figures welcomed news of Mughnieh's death, while the news media were quick to predict that Hezbollah would attempt to carry out revenge attacks against Israeli targets.

Mughnieh was wanted for his suspected role in a string of attacks against US and Israeli targets, including the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires that killed 29 people and the abduction of Western hostages in Lebanon in the 1980s.

He was also linked to the bombing of the US marine barracks at Beirut airport in 1983, in which 241 US servicemen perished, and the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 in 1985, in which a US navy diver was killed.

He was suspected by Western intelligence services of working directly for Iranian intelligence and was on the US State Department's list of most wanted terrorism suspects.

Residents of Mughnieh's home village of Tair Debba, some 5km east of the Lebanese coastal town of Tyre, gathered in the street to listen to radio and television reports about his death.

"We heard that he was killed in a car bombing in Syria," village mayor Hussein Saad said, adding that he had declared three days of mourning.

Saad said that Mughnieh's brothers, Jihad and Fuad, has also been killed in car bombings in 1984 and 1995.

Hezbollah announced that Mughnieh's funeral service would be held today.
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