has been suppressed by the Islamist movement on the eve of its publication, according to reports in Lebanon.
Her husband, Imad Mughniyah, is known worldwide as the man who organized the truck-bomb attacks on the US and French barracks in Beirut in 1983 that killed 299 people. He was assassinated in his car in Damascus in 2008 in an operation often credited to Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service.
The purported story of Hezbollah’s suppression of the book has been related on a Beirut opposition website. The motive for telling the story now, two years after it occurred, is unclear. But Hezbollah would clearly be embarrassed by the tale of the widow of its greatest martyr living the high life.
The book—“Prominent Women in the Arab World”— contained the first known photo of Mughniyah’s wife.
According to the manuscript, she is in her early thirties, controls a home furniture business in Lebanon, an African-based development company with operations in South America and Asia, women’s clothing shops in Dubai and Russia, an oil exploration company and more. She is said to be worth millions of dollars.
The book was due to be launched two years ago at a rollout party in Beirut’s fashionable Phoenicia Hotel. But, as the guests were arriving, the author, Emad Shahin, received a call from a Hezbollah official who said the book could not be released.
Shahin said the book did not mention any security issues, but the caller pointed to the photo of Wafaa and the description of her wealth. A compromise was reached and those two pages were clued together in all the copies stacked at the launch party.
The next day, however, Hezbollah troops circulated around Beirut’s bookshops picking up all the copies, according to the website account.