The United States is offering an up to $10 million reward for information leading to the location or identification of Salim Jamil Ayyash, a senior Hizbullah operative working in the group’s assassination unit. The US State Department announced on Monday that it is also offering the reward for information “leading to preventing him from engaging in an act of international terrorism against a US person or US property.”
On December 11, 2020, an international tribunal sentenced Ayyash in absentia to five concurrent sentences of life imprisonment on terrorism-related charges pertaining to the February 2005 suicide truck bombing in Beirut that killed Lebanon’s former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. The attack also killed 21 others and wounded 226.
Ayyah, 57, has lived in areas throughout Lebanon and is believed to be hiding somewhere in the country, under the protection of Hizbullah chief Hassan Nasrallah.