Naharnet Newsdesk - Hizbullah's Moghniyeh is Accused of Engineering Istanbul Bombings

Hizbullah's Moghniyeh is Accused of Engineering Istanbul Bombings

Imad Moghniyeh, the most wanted Lebanese on the U.S. terror list, is reported Friday to have masterminded the recent spate of suicide bombings that killed 61 people and injured 712 others in Istanbul.
In a London-datelined story by Iranian reporter Ali Nouri Zadeh, the Saudi-owned newspaper Asharq Al Awsat said Moghniyeh had recently fled asylum in Iran to stay three weeks in Iraq before moving incognito into Turkey.

Moghniyeh, the one-time security chief of Hizbullah when it was founded in Lebanon in the early 1980s, engineered several anti-occupation bombings in central and south Iraq, including the devastation of the Italian Carabinieri base in which 19 people were killed three weeks ago.

Asharq Al Awsat said Moghniyeh, who enjoys the support of the Quds (Jerusalem) Brigade in Iran's Revolutionary Guards corps, managed to beat a manhunt for his arrest by Iran's secret service after "he overreached himself and began playing with fire."

The newspaper cited a source, who it said, is close to Al Quds Brigade for the report on Moghniyeh's involvement in the bombing of two synagogues, the British Consulate and the branch of the HSBC Bank in Istanbul. The source was identified only as Hussein Alakbend.

Moghniyeh, who has long been known as the jackal in Tehran, filtered across a maze of Iranian security barriers to sneak into southern Iraq before traveling north to cross the border into Turkey, where he goes by the nom de guerre of Imet Agha.

The newspaper said Moghniyeh had founded Hizbullah branches in Iraq and Turkey during his two decades of asylum in Iran. He is accused by the United States of engineering the 1983 suicide bombing of a U.S. Marines base at Beirut airport in which 241 American servicemen were killed.

The U.S. holds Moghniyeh responsible for the spate of hostage-taking attacks against Americans in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war and for the 1985 hijacking of a TWA jetliner to the Lebanese capital, killing a U.S. navy diver aboard.

Beirut, Updated 01 Dec 03, 13:08