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Former Fatah terrorist who recruited Hezbollah’s Mughniyeh dies of COVID-19

  • February 23, 2021

Anis Naccache, a pro-Palestinian former terrorist who participated in the 1975 kidnapping of oil ministers in Vienna, died after battling COVID-19, a Palestinian official and Lebanese media said Monday. He was 69.

Naccache, a Lebanese citizen, participated in attacks around the world but spent much of the past two decades running a Beirut-based think tank and frequently appeared on TV shows as an analyst on Middle Eastern affairs.

Syria-based Palestinian official Khaled Abdul-Majid and Lebanese media outlets said Naccache died in a private hospital in the Syrian capital Damascus, where he had been undergoing treatment for days.

Hailing him as a “thinker and freedom fighter,” the official SANA news agency said he was “admitted into intensive care two days ago… because his health deteriorated as a result of COVID-19.”

Authorities will repatriate his remains for burial in Lebanon, said the pro-Damascus Al-Mayadeen television channel.

Born in June 1951, Naccache joined late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s Fatah group in the early 1970s and also worked closely with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Among those Naccache recruited while with Fatah was arch-terrorist Imad Mughniyeh, who later rose to become Hezbollah’s top operative.

Mughniyeh was implicated in some of the terror group’s major attacks, including the 1992 bombing at the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, and the 1994 bombing of the AMIA building in the Argentinian capital, in which 85 people were killed.

The senior Hezbollah terrorist was also involved in the 1983 bombing at the US Embassy in Beirut, the killing in 1994 of the CIA’s Lebanon chief William F. Buckley and the 1996 bombing at the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia.

He was assassinated in Damascus in 2008 by a bomb planted in his vehicle in an attack blamed on Israel.

“Imad’s friend is gone. May his clean soul be blessed by a thousand mercies,” tweeted Mughniyeh’s sister, Zeinab.

In the early 1970s, Naccache became a friend and associate of Venezuelan-born Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, a former political extremist known as Carlos the Jackal. In one of his most dramatic operations as a terrorist, Carlos led an attack on a meeting of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries in Vienna in December 1975. More than 60 people, including 11 OPEC ministers, were taken hostage and three people were killed. Naccache took part in the operation.

Years later, Naccache and four other men were convicted in the July 1980 attack in France on Shahpour Bakhtiar, Iran’s prime minister before the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Bakhtiar escaped injury but a policeman and a bystander were killed.

In 1990, France pardoned Naccache and his four accomplices. His release had been demanded by Iran-backed terrorists who set off deadly bombs around Paris in 1986.

In recent years, Naccache, a vocal supporter of Syrian President Bashar Assad, regularly appeared as a commentator on pro-Iranian media platforms such as Al-Mayadeen and Al-Manar, a Lebanese television channel operated by Hezbollah.

He also “played until the mid-1990s an important coordination role between the leadership of the Palestinian resistance and that of the Islamic revolution in Iran,” SANA said.

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