Details of Mughnieh's Assassination in Damascus Revealed in Book on Mossad
A book on the Israeli secret service, Mossad, revealed the details of the assassination of Hizbullah prominent official Imad Mughnieh in Syria in 2008, reported al-Khaleej newspaper on Tuesday.
Mossad: The Greatest Missions of the Israeli Secret Service by Michael Bar-Zohar and Nissim Mishal dedicated a whole chapter to the assassination of the secretive Hizbullah official, who was killed in car bomb in Damascus.
The authors wrote that Mughnieh was in Damascus to meet with a woman he had secretly married.
The unidentified woman always knew of when the slain official would be arriving from Beirut or Tehran to Damascus, they added.
They also revealed that he was never accompanied by his personal bodyguards or drivers whenever he headed to the residence in Damascus' Kfarsousa neighborhood.
Bar-Zohar and Mishal said that Mughnieh was difficult to identify due to the operations he had made to his face and the lack of recent photographs of him.
Prior to his traveling to Damascus however, Mossad agents succeeded in photographing him with a mobile phone.
The photograph was sent to the Mossad office in Tel Aviv to verify his identity.
The night before the assassination, three Mossad agents were charged with carrying out the task, each arriving from a different city, one from Paris, another from Milan, and the third from Amman.
The three had fake passports stating that they were businessmen and tourism agents.
In Damascus and after meeting with his wife Mughnieh was scheduled to meet with representatives from Syrian and Iranian intelligence.
For their part, the Mossad agents met in Damascus with fellow agents operating in Syria.
They were taken to a secret garage where they placed explosives in a taxi.
Other operatives were charged with monitoring Mughnieh's activity after he left his wife's apartment.
The booby-trapped taxi was placed near the area that the Hizbullah official was expected to park his car to head to his meeting with Syrian and Iranian intelligence representatives.
It was remotely detonated through electronic equipment, assassinating Mughnieh on February 12, 2008.
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