(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-02-14 00:02

JERUSALEM _ The Israeli government on Wednesday denied involvement in the assassination of Hezbollah fugitive Imad Mughniyeh, rejecting allegations from the Lebanese guerrilla group that Israel was behind the killing.

"Israel is looking into the reports from Lebanon or from Syria regarding the death of a senior Hezbollah official, and is learning for the first time the details being reported in the media in the past few hours," Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's office said.

"Israel rejects the attempt by terror groups to attribute to it any involvement in this incident. We have nothing further to add," read the statement.

Israel's defense minister, Ehud Barak, declined comment, though officials said he learned of Mughniyeh's death from news reports while on a working visit to Turkey. Barak returned to Israel on Wednesday afternoon and did not refer to the killing in a memorial speech in Israel's north for 73 soldiers who died in a 1997 helicopter collision.

Hezbollah charged that Israeli agents were behind the death of Mughniyeh, reported to have been killed in a car bomb explosion in Damascus, Syria on Tuesday night. The killing was a blow to the Lebanese group, which fought a bitter 34-day war against Israel in 2006.

Mughniyeh was charged with involvement in a string of attacks against U.S., Israel and Jewish targets since the 1980s.

Israeli lawmaker Danny Yatom, a former head of the Mossad spy agency, praised the killing Wednesday. "In the fight against terror today by the free and democratic world, I think that the free and democratic world today achieved a very, very important goal," Yatom said.

Mughniyeh might have been killed by a rival group and not by a Western intelligence service, said Eliezer Tsafrir, an ex-Mossad agent who was the Israeli intelligence organization's Beirut station chief in 1983 and 1984, the time of the first attacks against U.S. targets in which Mughniyeh was implicated.

"These people make a lot of internal enemies. So it doesn't necessarily have to be Israel or America," Tsafrir said.

Tsafrir was an eyewitness to one of the attacks, the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marines barracks in Beirut, which left 241 Americans dead. Mughniyeh was also involved in capturing and holding Ron Arad, an Israeli air force navigator who has been missing for more than two decades, he said.

Mughniyeh served as a liaison between Hezbollah and its patrons in Iranian intelligence, relaying instructions and information, Tsafrir said.

"I have no doubt that if there are people who have a lot of blood on their hands, he's one," Tsafrir said.

Israeli military officials declined to say whether they were taking any additional precautions along the northern border with Lebanon. In July 2006, Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers and killed three others in a cross-border raid, sparking the war with Israel.