BEIRUT: One of the five Hezbollah members being tried in absentia over the 2005 murder of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was the target behind a Jan. 18 Israeli airstrike in Syria's Golan Heights, The New York Times said Tuesday.
According to a report authored by Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman, Hezbollah operative Mustafa Amine Badreddine was supposed to be in the convoy that was targeted in an Israeli airstrike that killed six Hezbollah members and an Iranian general. But Badreddine's life was spared because he “dropped out of the gathering at the last minute,” the report alleged.
It did not cite sources.
It also said that six out of the seven men in the convoy were killed. But Hezbollah buried its six members in the week after the Qunaitra attack, and Iran's Revolutionary Guard acknowledged that one of its commanders was killed.
The faces of the seven were displayed on banners in a stadium during a Jan. 30 speech by Hezbollah chief Hasan Nasrallah to commemorate their deaths.
It was unclear if the report made a counting error, or if the author is suggesting that one of the men survived the attack.
Among those killed were Jihad Mughniyeh, son of late-Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyeh, and field commander Mohammad Issa. The older Mughniyeh was killed when Israeli agents detonated a bomb in his car in Syria in 2008.
The report said that Badreddine took over many of Mughniyeh's duties after his 2008 assassination. It also cited an "intelligence operative in the region" as saying that Badreddine was involved in launching attacks against Israel from Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
Badreddine is married to the sister of the older Mughniyeh. He was reportedly seen receiving condolences at the younger Mughniyeh’s funeral last month.
Prosecutors in the Hariri trial accuse Badreddine of being the mastermind of a 5-man cell alleged to have been behind the Feb. 14, 2005 attack that killed Hariri and 21 others in Downtown Beirut.
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