On day of Badereddine funeral, Argentina’s former leader Carlos Menem accused Hezbollah of killing his son
On Friday, Hezbollah buried its top military commander Mustafa Badreddine, 55, swaggering architect of Islamic terrorism as we know it today and one of the world’s most accomplished bomb-makers.
Not much is known about how he died. After a three day silence, Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Shi’ite militia that is battling to save Syrian president Bashar Assad, announced that he had died in a “shelling by extremist apostates.”
No group has taken responsibility for his death but doubts have already been raised.
“Badreddine was a bad guy,” Daniel Nisman, co-founder of the Levantine Group and a security analyst focusing on the Eastern Mediterranean, told The Media Line. “Many are happy to see him gone. But I can tell you that it is not who Hezbollah is saying it was. There was no airstrike. It’s either foreign involvement or an internal event.”
A long list of local actors wanted Badreddine dead, including Shi’ite rivals, Sunni rebels and their backers in the Gulf Emirates, France, the United States, Israel and the Hariri family and its allies. Badreddine was accused by a UN tribunal of masterminding the 2005 assassination of Rafik Hariri, the former prime minister of Lebanon.
With his brother-in-law, Imad Mughniyah, who was killed by a car bomb in 2008, Badreddine orchestrated three decades of some of the worst terror attacks, bombings, hostage-takings, assassinations, and airplane hijackings the world has seen.
At the time of his death, he was commanding some 6000 troops fighting against rebels in Syria.
“Along with Imad Mughniyah and a couple of others, Badreddine initiated the era of modern terror in which we still live,” Ryan Crocker, a former American ambassador to Lebanon told The New Yorker. “I could not be happier that someone killed the son of a bitch.”
In a bleak reminder of the extent of Hezbollah’s reach, on the same day as Badreddine was buried, Carlos Menem, the former president of Argentina, accused Hezbollah of murdering his son, Carlos Jr., popularly known as Carlitos, who died in an unresolved helicopter crash in 1995, when he was 26 years old.
Menem, a Muslim-born convert to Catholicism, infuriated Iran by resuming ties with Israel and the United States after two terror attacks widely attributed to Hezbollah rocked Buenos Aires: the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy and the 1994 bombing of AMIA, a Jewish center. Over 100 Argentines were killed in the attacks.
At a court hearing on Friday, Menem referred to the death of his son as “the third attack.”
In his testimony, Menem, who was president from 1989-1999 and is currently a senator, said his then- minister of foreign relations, Guido Di Tella, who died in 2001, told him he had heard through foreign embassies of Hezbollah’s alleged involvement in the death.
Argentine prosecutors believe Hezbollah and Iran were responsible for both bombings which remain the worst terrorist attacks in Argentine history.
Damian Pachter, an Argentine journalist investigating the extent of Islamist penetration in Latin America, told The Media Line that “we are talking about two separate things. Hezbollah absolutely continues to harbor ambitions regarding its possible influence over Latin American governments and its ability to perpetrate further acts of terror there. There’s no doubt about that.”
“But about Carlitos, I don’t know,” he said. “It is not their normal modus operandi.”
Concerns about Islamist outposts in Latin America date as far back as the 1992 attack in Argentina.
On Friday, the New York Times reported that just before his 2007 disappearance in Iran, the CIA consultant Robert Levinson told a friend working at ABC News that he “had located a major al Qaeda operative in Venezuela and was observing a man going into a local mosque twice a day.”
ABC News dispatched an employee to Venezuela, where he rented a room at a hotel across the street from the mosque and waited in vain for the terrorist to appear.
In 1998, the British newspaper The Independent speculated that Carlitos Menem’s “helicopter may have been shot down by the Lebanese Islamic fundamentalist group Hezbollah as a warning to the president to drop investigations into two earlier bomb attacks against Argentine Jews.”
“Investigators,” The Independent reported, “have said some evidence in the bombings pointed to involvement by Hezbollah and by Iranian agents.”
It is unclear whether Hezbollah’s international activities have been curtailed by the significant losses it has incurred during the three years it has propped up Assad’s tottering régime alongside its principal sponsor, Iran.
Badreddine’s death “is a big blow until they can find a replacement,” Nisman says. “”It’s a psychological blow: if it is internal they have some pretty bad internal strife, and if it is not internal, it means their guys are not safe anywhere.”
Bilal Y. Saab, a senior fellow for Mideast Security and the Chairman of the Gulf Policy Working Group & ISIS War Game Series at the Atlantic Council, posted that “having observed this group up close most of my adult life, this isn’t the end of story of Badreddine’s killing. We may never know it. #Hezbollah [3].”
There has long been speculation about the possible cause of Menem Jr.s death. In 2014, Virginia Vallejo, a former lover of the Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar, linked the death of Carlos Menem Jr. to Escobar family money that was laundered through Argentina in the 90s when Menem Sr. was president..
“Carlitos Menem was traveling in a helicopter and bam! It blows up. The same thing happened to a close friend of [former Colombian president] Álvaro Uribe who was also killed in a helicopter crash shortly before he was scheduled to testify at the US Embassy. He was blown up by the same people, I believe,” Vallejo said.
Despite his parents’ conversions, Carlitos Menem was buried in the Muslim cemetery of San Justo, a locality west of Buenos Aires.