Syria to air confession of 'Israeli spy' in Mughniyeh hit

News agency says it will expose Israel's assassination of Hezbollah commander; Druse leader says Lebanon has no claim to Shebaa Farms.

By OREN KESSLER
Hezbollah Imad Mughniyeh 311 (R) (photo credit: Reuters)
Hezbollah Imad Mughniyeh 311 (R)
(photo credit: Reuters)
Syria will broadcast a taped confession of a Syrian officer it says aided Israel in assassinating top Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyeh in 2008, Damascus’s official SANA news agency said Thursday.
Mughniyeh was killed in 2008 in Damascus in a massive car bombing Hezbollah and its allies attributed to Israel.
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SANA is promoting the broadcast as “confessions of an Israeli spy,” whom authorities said was discovered in neighboring Turkey. The agency said he would “reveal some of the details of the conspiracy against Syria, how he facilitated the assassination of Mughniyeh, and how spies are working under the cover of darkness to sow sedition, assassinate resistance figures and plunge the country into anarchy.”
Meanwhile, in Beirut, Hezbollah slammed Druse leader Walid Jumblatt for implying that claims to the tiny Shaba Farms (Mount Dov) border area are an insufficient pretext for the radical group to maintain arms and lead Lebanon into wars, the Daily Star newspaper reported.
Jumblatt recently said he rejected “linking the fate of Lebanon to the liberation of the Shaba Farms and linking its future to all the region’s conflicts.” Israel maintains the area is part of the Golan Heights, while Syria has been ambiguous about its own claims there.
“Hezbollah rejects outright such statements, based on the party’s ideology toward the conflict with Israel,” Hezbollah MP Hussein Musawi said in remarks published Thursday in the Kuwaiti daily Al- Anbaa.
“As long as Israel continues to occupy not only territory in Lebanon but also Arab territory as well as Muslim and Christian territory in Palestine, the party is ideologically committed not to trust usurpers and occupiers and considers their presence an attack on both Islamic and Arab nations,” he said.
Earlier this week, MP Muhammad Raad of Hezbollah’s Loyalty to the Resistance bloc said Lebanon’s March 14 alliance is carrying out “the goals of the US-Israeli project” in the region.
“Those who are [working against] the resistance are merely fulfilling the goals of the imperialist project that benefits the US-Israeli plan in the region,” he said, according the website Now Lebanon.
Raad urged Lebanese to be “permanently aware and ready to confront this project, or else the future of our country will be in danger.”