Hezbollah leader reported killed

BEIRUT— A Hezbollah commander and several other fighters from the Lebanese Shiite militant group have been killed in Syria, a senior Lebanese security official and Syrian activists said Tuesday.

Hezbollah, which is backed by both Syria and Iran, is a strong ally of President Bashar Assad’s embattled regime and has long been accused by the Syrian opposition of assisting Damascus in its crackdown on the18-month-old uprising — a claim the group has repeatedly denied. The security official said Hezbollah commander Ali Hussein Nassif’s body was returned to Lebanon through the Masnaa border crossing on Sunday. Speaking on condition of anonymity in line with regulations, he said several other Hezbollah fighters’ bodies have been brought back to Lebanon in the past few days. It was not immediately clear how the militants were killed or whether they had been fighting alongside the Syrian army. Samer al-Homsi, an activist in Syria’s central Homs province, which borders Lebanon, said Nassif was killed Saturday when a roadside bomb hit the car he was riding in near the town of Qusair. “His job was to co-ordinate with Syrian security agencies,” al-Homsi said via Skype. He added that the rebels detonated the bomb “without knowing” that the target was a Hezbollah official. “We knew he was a Hezbollah official after it was announced by the group in Lebanon,” he said. Al-Homsi’s account could not be independently verified. Hezbollah’s newspaper al-Intiqad said Nassif, who is also known as Abu Abbas, was a Hezbollah com- mander and was killed “while performing his jihadi duties.” It did not say when or where he was killed.

His funeral, which was held Sunday in the eastern town of Budai, near Baalbek in Lebanon’s eastern Bekaa Valley, was attended by top Hezbollah officials, including the head of the group’s judicial council, Sheik Mohammed Yazbek, and the head of the political bureau, Sheik Ibrahim Amin al-Sayed.

On Tuesday, Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV showed the funerals of at least two other Hezbollah members it said were killed while performing their “jihadi duty.”