Subject:  Beirut Bomber Behind Attacks on Troops in Iraq, Telegraph Says |
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Date Posted: 21:08:15 04/27/04 Tue
Beirut Bomber Behind Attacks on Troops in Iraq, Telegraph Says
27 avril 04 - (Bloomberg)(Sunday Telegraph 4-25 24)
Imad Mughniyeh, accused by American authorities of blowing up the American embassy in Beirut in the 1980s, is now coordinating suicide bomb attacks against coalition targets in southern Iraq, said the Sunday Telegraph, citing unidentified western intelligence officials.
The officers believe Mughniyeh, a leading figure in the Lebanese Shiite Muslim group Hezbollah, has deployed scores of Lebanese Hezbollah fighters in Iraq and set up secret training camps near the southern border with Iran, said the newspaper.
The Hezbollah fighters, working closely with Iran's Revolutionary Guards, are seeking to drive coalition forces out of Iraq with the kind of terror tactics they used in the 1980s when they forced the Reagan administration to withdraw U.S. forces from Beirut, the newspaper said.
The strategy has been devised by ``hardliners'' in Iran whose aim is to create an Iranian-style Islamic republic in Iraq, one unidentified senior intelligence official said, according to the newspaper. The strategy goes against the wishes of the Iranian government, the paper said, although Iran's spiritual leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has called on Iraqis to unite to expel coalition forces, the newspaper said.
Mughniyeh, who is in his fifties, has close links with Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terror network, the paper said.
More than 90 coalition soldiers have died this month in some of the deadliest fighting in Iraq since U.S.-led forces ousted former dictator Saddam Hussein a year ago.
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