The main suspect in the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers complex in Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 United States Air Force personnel and injured nearly 500 people, was arrested in Beirut and is now being held in Riyadh, the Associated Press (AP) reported today. The AP identified the suspect as Ahmed al-Mughassil, the head of Hezbollah’s military wing in Saudi Arabia, and reported that the arrest had been confirmed by an unidentified U.S. official.
In the Khobar attack, militants parked a fuel trailer truck just outside the shallow perimeter of the apartment complex, 85 feet away from one of the eight-story buildings. The blast demolished one side of the building, leaving a massive crater.
The U.S. later moved its Air Force contingent to the Prince Sultan Air Base, a vast compound in a remote stretch of desert south of the Saudi capital, Riyadh. …
The 2001 indictment placed heavy blame on Iran for nurturing the attack but stopped short of mentioning any Iranians by name or linking them directly to Khobar.
The prosecutor in the 2001 case was James Comey, who is currently the director of the FBI.
Reuters reported:
In 2006, a U.S. federal judge ordered Iran to pay $254 million to the families of 17 U.S. service personnel killed in the attack in a judgment entered against the Iranian government, its security ministry and the Revolutionary Guards after they failed to respond to a lawsuit initiated more than four years earlier.
The 209-page ruling had found that the truck bomb involved in the attack was assembled at a base in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley operated by Hezbollah and the Revolutionary Guards, and the attack was approved by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Iran’s current defense minister, Hossein Dehghan, was implicated in the 1983 bombing of U.S. Marines barracks in Beirut that killed 241 American servicemen.
Sen. Tom Cotton (R – Ark.) mentioned both bombings, as well as attacks on American troops in Iraq by Iran-backed Shiite militias, when he wrote earlier this year “that Iran has been killing Americans for more than three decades.”
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