$7m bounty on head, slain commander was wanted for 1983 US embassy blast

BEIRUT: Ibrahim Aqil, the Hezbollah operations commander killed in an Israeli strike on Friday, had a $7 million bounty on his head for two 1983 Beirut truck bombings that killed more than 300 people at the American embassy and a US Marines barracks.

Believed to be in his 60s, Aqil, who has also used the aliases Tahsin and Abdelqader, was the second member of Hezbollah's top military body, Jihad Council, to be killed in two months after an Israeli strike in the same area targeted Fuad Shukr in July. Over the past two decades, Israel has slowly killed many of the Jihad Council's members, who are some of Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah's top advisers.

Like Shukr, Aqil is a veteran of Hezbollah, which was founded by Iran's Revolutionary Guards in the early 1980s to battle Israeli forces that had invaded and occupied Lebanon.

The US accuses him of a role in the Beirut truck bombings at the American embassy in April 1983, which killed 63 people, and a US Marine barracks six months later that killed 241 people. It further accused him of directing the abduction of American and German hostages in Lebanon and listed him as a specially designated global terrorist in 2019.

When Shukr was killed, it was seen as the heaviest blow to its command structure since the 2008 killing of Imad Mughniyeh, remembered by Hezbollah as a legendary commander. Aqil, whose bounty was set by the US at an even higher value than that of Shukr's, may prove a similar blow.