KUWAIT: Mughniyah killing reverberates

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He is hailed as a hero by some people and loathed as a terrorist by others in the same country. In Kuwait, controversy over Hezbollah’s slain military commander, Imad Mughniyah, has awakened political tensions between the country’s dominant Sunnis and its Shiite Muslim minority.

The small oil-rich Persian Gulf country officially held Mughniyah responsible for the hijacking of a Kuwait airline flight and the death of two passengers some 20 years ago.

Still, Kuwaiti supporters of the Shiite militant group Hezbollah and its leader Hassan Nasrallah eulogized the elusive man as a martyr in a ceremony last Saturday.

Two days later, the Cabinet harshly chided the mourners who took part in the ceremony. It issued a statement Monday condemning ‘the awful behavior of the few that eulogized and glorified the terrorist who killed the innocent. With his death came the justice of Allah.’

In addition to Kuwait, many other countries were after Mughniyah for a string of attacks that claimed hundreds of lives in his native Lebanon and abroad in the 1980s and 1990s.

Strong reactions to the Kuwait eulogy continued on Wednesday when an opposition parliamentary bloc expelled two Shiite lawmakers for mourning Mughniyah and filed a lawsuit against them. Some members of Parliament have even called on the two to resign from the 50-seat House.

Also on Thursday, the Kuwaiti Embassy in Beirut received anonymous threats of rocket attacks against its premises. As a response, the embassy’s personnel were evacuated from the building.

— Raed Rafei in Beirut

Video: Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah eulogizes slain militant Imad Mughniyah (with English subtitles).