Thank you for using rssforward.com! This service has been made possible by all our customers. In order to provide a sustainable, best of the breed RSS to Email experience, we've chosen to keep this as a paid subscription service. If you are satisfied with your free trial, please sign-up today. Subscriptions without a plan would soon be removed. Thank you!

Sharif Karim/Reuters

Hussein Laqees, center, the son of Hassan Laqees, was flanked on Dec. 20 at a memorial ceremony for his father by Sayyed Hashem Safieddine, left, head of the Hezbollah Executive Council, and Ghazanfar Roknabadi, the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon.

BEIRUT, Lebanon — As a little girl, Noor did not know exactly what her father, Hassane Laqees, did for Hezbollah, but even then, she knew she might lose him early. During his long absences, she recalled recently, she would gaze at a photo of him lying asleep and imagine that she was seeing his corpse.

Last month, Mr. Laqees was gunned down in a southern Beirut parking garage by unknown assassins, and Noor, now 28 and an English literature teacher, learned along with the rest of the country who he was: Hezbollah's master technician and logistics expert, eulogized by its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, as a beloved friend and one of the group's "bright minds."

Mr. Laqees joined Hezbollah at its founding in the 1980s as a 19-year-old with a penchant for technology, and he helped build an arsenal more sophisticated than those of many national armies, transforming the Shiite militia into a force that successfully challenged Israel in battle. He helped set up systems of surveillance drones and independent telecommunications, and he used secret bases inside Syria to store the long-range, sophisticated missiles that analysts say are now being funneled into Lebanon.

Israel's Mossad spy agency put Mr. Laqees on a hit list years ago, identifying him as one of the five men it most wanted dead. From 2008 to 2011, four perished in cloak-and-dagger style. A car bomb in Damascus, Syria's capital, killed Hezbollah's military leader, Imad Mughniyeh. A sniper shot a Syrian general on a beach in Tartus. A Hamas official was strangled in a hotel room in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, by assassins who, in an embarrassment for Mossad, were photographed by elevator cameras. And an Iranian general was killed in an explosion at a Tehran missile depot.

Mr. Laqees was the last on that list to die.

Lebanese and Israeli analysts say that Israel, working through proxies, is the most likely suspect. Yet as Hezbollah shifted course over the past two years, sending its forces into Syria to support the government, its ally, against an armed uprising joined by foreign jihadists, Mr. Laqees earned new enemies. Even among some Shiites there were whispers of disapproval and concerns that the group had aggravated sectarian tensions and opened them up to retaliation.

So Mr. Laqees's assassination has become a political whodunit infused with all the complexity of a convulsing region's tangled and shifting alliances and enmities. Saudi intelligence officers, Lebanese Sunni militants, fighters from Al Qaeda, Syrian insurgents — all have been floated as possible killers. Analysts say that because of the secrecy of Mr. Laqees's work and the professional nature of the killing, an intelligence service was probably involved. But even those least likely to have killed him have been eager to take credit.

Mr. Laqees stood in the cross hairs of several forces that have increasingly found common cause. Sunni-led Saudi Arabia, the Syrian insurgency it backs against President Bashar al-Assad, and Israel all find themselves in opposition to Hezbollah and its patron, Shiite-led Iran. Hezbollah and the Syrian government accuse Saudi Arabia of participating in a "Wahhabi-Zionist conspiracy," a reference to the austere Wahhabi sect of Sunni Islam. Israeli and Saudi analysts agree that their countries share an interest in checking Hezbollah and Iran.

Mr. Nasrallah, Hezbollah's leader, blamed Israel for the killing of Mr. Laqees, saying that early claims of responsibility by what most observers believe was a fictitious Sunni group were attempts to sow sectarian strife.

But Iranian officials also pointed fingers at a Qaeda-linked militant group led by a Saudi fugitive recently captured in Lebanon. Adding to the uncertainty and mystery, that group, the Abdullah Azzam Brigades, claimed last week that Mr. Laqees actually died in the bombing of Iran's Beirut embassy in November.

Syrian rebels claimed that they had killed him in Syria and that the Beirut crime scene was a cover-up. There were even rumors that he was killed by Hezbollah comrades in an internal dispute or betrayal, both of which would be unusual in the highly disciplined organization.

Ali Rizk, Beirut news director of Press TV of Iran, said that Mr. Laqees's death showed that the atmosphere of hostility toward Hezbollah created opportunities for its enemies. Ronen Bergman, an Israeli security expert who detailed Mossad's hit list in his book "The Secret War With Iran," said Israel often uses local proxies in countries too risky for its own agents.

Mr. Laqees also lived on the fault lines of the unease in Lebanon over Hezbollah's intervention in Syria, something that emerged as his death revealed rare glimpses of a senior Hezbollah operative's character and personal background.