The Fatah connection to Mughniyah

Time has an interesting tidbit about the late terrorist Imad Mughniyah: A U.S. official told TIME that Mughniyah had been linked to the 2002 discovery of 50 tons of weapons by Israeli Navy commandos who intercepted a freighter called Karine A in the Red Sea. Wikipedia mentions: The captain of the vessel was Omar Akawi, a Fatah activist since 1976 and former member of the Palestinian Authority. According to the Beirut newspaper The Daily Star, the alleged purchaser of the weapons, Adel Salameh (aka Adel 'Moghrabi`) was a former member of Yassir Arafat's staff until the early 1980's "when he was dismissed for conducting private business which conflicted with his official status." Robert Satloff wrote an extensive article about the Karine A affair, and says the karine-A was a joint undertaking of Yasir Arafat's Palestinian Authority (PA) and the Islamic Republic of Iran, facilitated through the good offices of the Lebanese terrorist organization Hizballah. The facts are these: On August 31, the head of the PA'S procurement department, one Adel Awadallah (a.k.a. Adel al-Mughrabi), purchased a 4,000-ton freighter in Lebanon with $400,000 provided by a man named Fuad Shobaki. With the rank of brigadier general in the Palestinian military; Shobaki held the tide of director of the Military Financial Administration; in practice, he was widely considered to be Arafat's closest financial advisor. The acquisition itself was supervised by two PA naval police officials, Fathi Razam and Omar Akawi. On September 12, the day after the World Trade Center/Pentagon terrorist attacks, the boat was registered with the Kingdom of Tonga and renamed the Karine-A. After steaming to Aden, Akawi took over as captain, with a crew of nine Egyptians and Jordanians--who evidently did not know about the arms smuggling plan--plus four armed and well-trained Palestinians. The ship proceeded to waters off the Iranian island of Kish. There, under the watchful eye of a chief aide to Imad Mughniyah--Hizballah's operations commander and the man thought responsible for the bombings of the U.S. embassy and Marine barracks in Lebanon and the bombings of the Israeli embassy and Jewish community center in Argentina--the boat was loaded with eighty crates of weapons. Though the weapons were not an outright gift from the ayatollahs to Arafat, they were sold at steep discount--$30-50 million of goods for just $10 million. So the same "moderate" leaders of the PA were intimately involved in working together with this master terrorist - and murderer of hundreds of Americans as well as Argentine Jews. No wonder the Palestinian Arabs are so upset that this mass murderer is dead.