Washington Post: CIA aided by Mossad set up Mughniyeh killing

The leading US capital daily, the Washington Post, Saturday headlined the revelation that the Central Intelligence Agency, aided by the Israeli Mossad, set up the assassination of Hizballah’s international terror and military chief, Imad Mughniyeh, on Feb. 18, 2008. Until now Israel alone was blamed for the assassination. According to the WP, as Mughniyeh approached his parked SUV on a Damascus street, a bomb planted in a spare tire in the trunk exploded. He was killed instantly by flying shrapnel. The device was said to be triggered remotely by Mossad in Tel Aviv, whose agents were in communications with CIA agents on the ground in Damascus.

“The way it was set up, the US could object and call it off, but could not execute,” a former US intelligence official told the WP. ”We probably blew up 25 bombs” in tests for ensuring that the blast would not cause collateral damage, he said.
The authority to kill Mughniyeh required a presidential finding by President George W. Bush, the paper reports. He ruled in favor at a time that Hizballah’s top man was known to be running the arming and training of Shiite militias targeting US forces in Iraq. This man had a long history of killing Americans, dating back to the planning of the 1983 bombing of the US embassy in Beirut that caused the deaths of hundreds of American marines;and  the 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers which housed US Air Force personnel securing Saudi oil fields. He was also known to have planned the 1992 Hizballah attack that blew up the Israel embassy in Buenos Aires.