By Aram Roston, NBC News Producer
One of the only Americans to have met Imad Mugniyeh, the terrorist leader killed in Syria, tells NBC News that the Hezbollah militant burned with "hatred" for the United States.
Kurt Carlson, of Illinois, was one of the hostages onboard TWA Flight 847 when it was hijacked in 1985 during a flight from Athens to Rome. In Beirut, the hijackers shot U.S. Navy diver Robert Stetham, a passenger on the plane, and dumped his body on the runway.
The hijackers imprisoned Carlson-a Reserve Officer in the U.S. military-and six others in a jail cell in Beirut.
"I can still picture him," Carlson recalled in a phone interview today. "It was like he had fire in his eyes. Just totally intense, you know, just the hatred he had for us."
Carlson had not yet heard of Mugniyeh's death, and when he learned of it from an NBC News producer he was excited. "Unbelievable!" he said. "Thank God he's gone."
TWA 847 was hijacked by members of Hezbollah, but members of Amal, a less radical Shiite group, took custody of the hostages and eventually negotiated their release. Carlson says Amal members allowed Mugniyeh to come to the cell where he was held, and that an Amal soldier identified him.
Mugniyeh spoke English to the American prisoners, all U.S. military personnel, and voiced political complaints. "You could just feel the emotion. His voice as he talked to us, just kept rising! it was just unbelievable. And the longer he talked... We thought he was going to leap out at us almost," Carlson says.
