Iran joins Syria in hunt for killers of militant

The Associated Press

DAMASCUS: Syria and Iran have agreed to conduct a joint investigation into the assassination of Imad Mugniyah, a commander of their ally Hezbollah, who was killed by a car bomb this week in the Syrian capital, Iran's state news agency reported Friday.

An Iranian television station aired what it said was mobile phone video footage of the blast in Damascus.

The grainy, dark images appeared to have been taken moments after the explosion Tuesday night. They show a vehicle engulfed in flames on a street at night, and several people running, apparently bystanders. It cannot be seen whether anyone is in the vehicle in the images, taken from a distance and lasting a few seconds.

The video was shown on Iran's state-run Arabic channel, Al Alam. The station did not say how it obtained the footage.

The Iranian foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, met in Damascus on Friday with the Syrian vice president, Farouk al-Sharaa, to discuss the assassination. Iran and Hezbollah have accused Israel of killing Mugniyah, and Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, vowed in a eulogy Thursday that his Shiite guerrilla group would retaliate against Israeli interests anywhere in the world.

"We discussed the terrorist crime that led to the martyrdom of one of the most senior commanders in the Lebanese Islamic Resistance, martyr Imad Mugniyah," Mottaki told reporters after his meeting with Sharaa.

Israel has denied any role in the killing, and Syria has not said who it believes was behind the blast. On Thursday, the Syrian foreign minister, Walid al-Moallem, said he expected the perpetrators to be identified soon.

In Tehran, Deputy Foreign Minister Ali Reza Sheik Attar said that during Mottaki's visit to Damascus, which began Thursday, Iran and Syria had agreed to form a joint investigation team to "look into the root causes and dimensions of the assassination to identify the perpetrators of this dirty crime," the state IRNA news agency reported.

Mugniyah, one of the most elusive and notorious Hezbollah commanders, was believed to have masterminded suicide bombings that killed hundreds of people, including American and French military personnel, during Lebanon's 1974-1990 civil war, as well as hostage-takings of Westerners and the 1985 hijacking of a TWA airliner in which a U.S. Navy diver was killed.

In the 1990s he went into hiding, and Western and Israeli intelligence agencies accused him of having planned suicide bombings against the Israeli Embassy and a Jewish cultural center in Argentina that killed more than 100 people. Over the past 15 years, he is believed to have moved in secret between Lebanon, Iran and Syria.

Mottaki attended Mugniyah's funeral Thursday in Beirut and met later in the day with President Bashar al-Assad of Syria to discuss the assassination. On Friday, he held talks with the Damascus-based leaders of the Palestinian militant groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Khaled Mashaal, Hamas's exiled leader, said Thursday that Mugniyah's death would not deter the militant Palestinian group from continuing its resistance against Israel.

"We accept the challenge and we are not afraid at all," Mashaal said at a wake for Mugniyah at a Palestinian refugee camp near Damascus.

In Iran, a former president, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, condemned the United States and Israel for welcoming Mugniyah's assassination, saying the car bomb that killed him was an act of terrorism.