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Fugitive militant Imad Mughniyeh, a top U.S. target suspected in the killings of hundreds of Americans as well as a series of infamous strikes against U.S., Israeli and Jewish targets, was killed in a car bomb blast in the Syrian capital Damascus, Iranian television and a Syrian human rights group said Wednesday. Hezbollah accused Israel for the assassination.

The shadowy Mughniyeh, a top figure in the Iranian- and Syrian-backed Shiite Hezbollah militant group, was one of the most notorious terror figures of the 1980s and 1990s but had virtually vanished for the past 15 years.

He was implicated in the 1983 bombings of the U.S Embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut that killed more than 300 people, the 1985 hijacking of a TWA flight in which an American Navy diver was killed and the kidnappings of numerous Americans in Lebanon, including then-AP Mideast chief correspondent Terry Anderson. Mughniyeh is on an FBI wanted list with a $25 million bounty on his head, equal to that of Al Qaeda leader Usama bin Laden.

Israel on Wednesday denied involvement in his slaying. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s office said in a statement that it was looking into reports of Mughniyeh’s death and that Israel “rejects the attempt by terror groups to attribute to it any involvement in this incident.”

But the blast, the first major attack against a leader of Hezbollah since a 1992 helicopter strike that killed Hezbollah secretary-general Sheik Abbas Mussawi in southern Lebanon, could dramatically heighten tensions between Israel and the Shiite militant group, as well as its Iranian and Syrian backers. Israel and Hezbollah fought a bloody war in summer 2006 that devastated south Lebanon.

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