By William Tucker
Chief Correspondent for In Homeland Security
Late Tuesday evening Hezbollah issued a press statement that “A leading Hezbollah member was assassinated on Tuesday evening near his house in the Saint Therese area in Hadath.” The militant organization would go on to blame Israel for the killing, however Israel immediately denied involvement. The target of this assassination was Hajj Hassan Houlo al-Laqis, a long time Hezbollah figure who had ties to several Palestinian militant groups, was known to have trained extensively in Iran, and was once Hezbollah’s procurement agent in Canada for smuggling stolen goods back to Lebanon. Though Israel is thought to have targeted Laqis in the past, and naturally they would be a likely source for this attack, it was a Sunni militant group calling itself The Free Sunnis of Baalbek Battalion which took responsibility for the killing via Twitter. It is certainly conceivable that Laqis was targeted by a Sunni group for Hezbollah’s operations in Syria. And while Laqis had a diverse resume, his involvement in Hezbollah’s Syrian operations isn’t exactly clear, but Laqis was alone when the attack was carried out. Furthermore, his death at his home suggests the responsible party conducted preoperational surveillance prior to the attack. Laqis may even have been targeted because doing so was a low risk operation, but it was also an operation that would cause considerable consternation for Hezbollah. Following the bombing outside of the Iranian embassy in Beirut, along with numerous other low-level attacks, Sunni groups will likely become bolder in their targeting of Iranian/Hezbollah figures as the Syrian war drags on.
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