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.

The United States indicted him for his role in planning and participating in the June 14, 1985, hijacking of a U.S. TWA airliner and the killing of an American passenger.

"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," State Department Spokesman Sean McCormack said.

"One way or another he was brought to justice," he said.

Hezbollah, a strong political and military force in Lebanon, called followers to his funeral on Thursday.

"After a life full of jihad, sacrifices and accomplishments ... Haj Imad Moughniyah ... died a martyr at the hands of the Israeli Zionists," Hezbollah said.

Moughniyah's coffin, draped in a Hezbollah flag and flanked by four men in military uniform, was laid in a hall where his family and leaders of the Shi'ite group received condolences.

The 2006 war with Israel was triggered by a Hezbollah cross-border raid in which two Israeli soldiers were captured.