Kerry: ‘No Comment’ on Report CIA, Mossad Behind 2008 Hezbollah Assassination

February 2, 2015

2 min read

US Secretary of State John Kerry refused to comment Saturday on a report in the Washington Post claiming Israel and the US were behind the 2008 assassination of Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyeh, saying he didn’t “know all the facts”.

Kerry was asked to comment on the report in Boston following a meeting with Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird and Mexican Foreign Secretary Jose Antonio Meade. Reporters wanted to know whether the report was true and “what are the implications of this disclosure for the Iran nuclear talks and any Middle East peace efforts?”

“I don’t have any comment at all on a report – first of all, I haven’t seen it, and secondly, I don’t know what all the facts are,” Kerry responded, according to a transcript released by the State Department.

“And thirdly, we don’t comment – certainly, the State Department doesn’t comment on any matter of intelligence or intelligence allegation. And so I can’t say anything further,” he added.

Baird added, “Canada has listed Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. Just this past week, it’s killed two IDF soldiers in northern Israel.”

Friday’s report in the Washington Post identified the Central Intelligence Agency and Israel’s Mossad as the bodies behind the 2008 targeted killing. Mughniyeh was killed after leaving a restaurant in Damascus, Syria, when a bomb attached to a spare tire on a parked car exploded, sending shrapnel flying in a tight radius.

The report, which cites former intelligence officials, claims the bomb was built and tested in the US and detonated remotely by the Mossad from Tel Aviv, based on up-to-the-minute reports from CIA operatives in Damascus.

Israel has never confirmed or denied its involvement in Mughniyeh’s death, and the CIA has declined to comment of the Washington Post report, the first to link the agency to the event.

Mughniyeh was a senior Hezbollah commander suspected of involvement in numerous terror attacks, including the abduction of Western hostages in Lebanon in the 1980s, the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Argentina which killed 29 people, the 1983 bombing of the US army barracks at Beirut airport which killed 241, and the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 in 1985.

Mughniyeh’s name returned to the news last month, when his son Jihad, also a high-ranking Hezbollah member, was killed in an airstrike in Syria. The younger Mughniyeh was allegedly planning abductions and terror attacks against northern Israel, under the sponsorship of Iran.

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