Hezbollah's most wanted commander killed in Syria bomb

By Tom Perry and Laila Bassam

BEIRUT (Reuters) - Senior Hezbollah commander Imad Moughniyah, on the United States' most wanted list for attacks on Israeli and Western targets, has been killed by a bomb attack in Damascus, the Lebanese group said on Wednesday.

Hezbollah, which is backed by Syria and Iran, accused Israel of assassinating Moughniyah by planting a bomb in his car. Tehran blamed Israel and condemned the attack as an act of "state terrorism". Washington welcomed his death.

Israel denied any involvement in the killing, seen as a major blow to a group whose last confrontation with the Jewish state was the 34-day war of 2006.

Moughniyah, 45, was killed late on Tuesday. He had long been on a list of foreigners Israel wanted to kill or capture and had been top of Washington's wanted list before al Qaeda's Osama bin Laden emerged as an enemy of the United States.

"His killing is a huge blow to Hezbollah," Magnus Ranstorp, terrorism expert at the Swedish National Defence College, said.

In his first official reaction to Tuesday's killing, Syrian Interior Minister Bassam Abdel Majeed condemned the attack as a "terrorist act" and said that an investigation was under way.

"Syria condemns this cowardly terrorist act and presents its condolences to the Lebanese people and to the family of the martyr," the official SANA news agency quoted Abdel Majeed as saying.

Moughniyah was implicated in the 1983 bombings of the U.S. embassy and U.S. Marine and French peacekeeping barracks in Beirut, which killed over 350 people, as well as the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires and the kidnapping of Westerners in Lebanon in the 1980s.