Hizballah probe claims Israel used Palestinian contacts for Mughniyeh hit

debkafile‘s intelligence report exclusively the findings of a special inquiry launched by Hizballah to solve the mystery of who killed the master terrorist Imad Mughniyeh and how.
debkafile‘s counter-terror sources stress that, above all, Hizballah was keen to clear itself of suspicion that Mughniyeh was betrayed by an insider planted by Mossad, and this report points at Palestinians who are accused of giving him away.
Their investigators claim that the Israeli Mossad tracked him down through the Palestinian operatives with whom he recently rendezvoused in Beirut and Damascus to coordinate a new wave of terror against Israel.
The Palestinians he met did not know his real identity, they claim. He posed as a senior Iranian intelligence officer called Hajj Radwan, who was based inside the Hizballah command.
This information was leaked to the Mossad networks said to be working under cover in Beirut and Damascus, who then tipped Mossad HQ in Tel Aviv. They too did not immediately identif
y Mughniyeh, say the Hizballah investigators – until a description was built up of his habits and connections. One of these was Hamas politburo chief Khaled Meshaal. The Israeli agents, it is said, then put two and two together and came up with the dangerous terrorist Israel and the US had been hunting for two and a half decades.
Two pieces of information clinched the fix, says the Hizballah report.
One was the type of terror operations he discussed with his Palestinian colleagues: “Hajj Radwan” laid before Palestinian terror planners mass high-quality attacks inside Israel in conjunction with Iran and Hizballah. They talked about scale, targets, funding, weapons and manpower.
No one but Imad Mughniyeh was believed to have the breadth and skill to put together a complex Palestinian operation of this type and its detailed cooperation with Tehran and Beirut.
The other clincher was the fact that the “Iranian officer” turned up for all his meetings without bodyguards. In this Mughniyeh was unique. No other Middle East terror chief moves without bodyguards, but the Lebanese terror mastermind trusted nothing and no one but total secrecy. For the Mossad, his lone wolf habits were a telltale trademark.
The Shiite group’s investigators went on to claim that when the Mossad realized that Mughniyeh was within their grasp, they ordered two hit teams waiting in West Europe to set out for Damascus and Beirut.
The Hizballah finds support for its conclusion in the resemblance between the alleged Mossad modus operandi for killing Mughniyeh and the way Ali Hassan Daib in 1999, Ali Hussein Salah in 2003 and Ghalb Alawi in 2004, were killed. All three were Hizballah liaison men who collaborated with Palestinian terror groups on joint attacks against Israel.