By Xinhua
Damascus : Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Muallem said Thursday that Syria would find the murderer of Hezbollah commander Imad Moughniyah as soon as possible.
Muallem made the remarks after meeting with his visiting Iranian counterpart Manouchehr Mottaki, who came to Damascus following a trip to Lebanon where he attended the late commander’s funeral.
Moughniyah was killed in a car bombing in a residential neighborhood in Damascus late Tuesday.
Muallem refused to comment on whether the Syrian authorities have arrested any suspects or whether there had been an infraction in Syria’s tightly controlled security apparatus.
“The fighter Imad Moughniyah was the target of lots of intelligence agencies. He was a backbone of the Islamic resistance,” he said, hinting on an Israeli involvement in the accident.
“Whoever wants peace does not commit terrorism, whoever wants peace does not lay siege to Gaza with a million and half Palestinians struggling for the minimum to survive,” he said.
His killing would undermine “any effort to revive the peace process” in the Mideast, he added.
Hezbollah has been accusing Israel of ordering the assassination, but Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s office denied any involvement.
Washington said Moughniyah had been responsible for the bombing of the U.S. embassy in Lebanon in 1983, a U.S. marine barrack in Beirut and several French barracks, in which over 300 U.S. and French troops as well as local Lebanese were killed.
Moughniyah, on an FBI wanted list with a 5-million-U.S.-dollar bounty on his head, was also believed by Israel to have been involved in planning the 1992 bombing of Israeli embassy in Argentina in which 29 people were killed and the blast at a Buenos Aires Jewish center two years later that killed 95 people.