Abdel-Ghani Jawhar, Lebanon´s most wanted militant Islamist terrorist, has been killed while planting bombs for the rebel movement in Syria, raising fresh concerns about the growing influence of radicals in the opposition to the Assad regime.

Jawhar was said by security sources quoted in the Lebanese media to have been killed in Qusayr, near the embattled city of Homs. According to one report, he blew himself up when a bomb he was preparing detonated prematurely.

He was the head of Fatah-al-Islam, a militant group that had fought the official Lebanese army and other militias. It is alleged to have loose ties with al-Qaeda, and is certainly part of a wider network of militant Sunni groups whose involvement in the Syrian opposition has alarmed not only potential western backers but also the opposition itself.

“They are growing quickly, it’s true,” Bassma Kodmani, principal spokesman of the Syrian National Council, told The Daily Telegraph. She said groups of fighters from outside the country were coming in with “a different agenda”.

Jawhar, believed to be in his 30s, originally joined the Muslim Brotherhood but became progressively more radical, becoming leader of Fatah-al-Islam two years ago. An expert bomb-maker, he was said to have masterminded attacks on both the Lebanese army and United Nations peacekeepers.

A second leader, Walid Boustani, who escaped from prison in Lebanon in 2010 and also went to Syria, is said to have been killed by members of the Free Syrian Army after an argument.

Qusayr has been bombarded by the Syrian regime’s forces for months, but half remains under rebel control, despite a major tank assault which was beaten off last Thursday.

Although the FSA, which answers to the Syrian National Council, is largely a mixture of defectors and local residents without political affiliation, some semi-independent units have been formed of more radical Islamists, including the Farouq Battalion, which operates in Homs and Qusayr.

These have been increasingly accused of persecuting residents in pursuit of a religious agenda beyond the uprising’s goal of unseating the regime. On occasion it is overtly sectarian – targeting the non- Sunni, Alawite minority from which the Assad family comes.

One Sunni businessman, who called himself “Abu Salah”, said he had fled Homs with his family after members of the Farouq battalion beat him for not attending Friday prayers at the local mosque, or protests afterwards.

“Three times men with long beards came to my house,” he said. “One said to me: ’The people running the country are Alawites, they have no religion. Why don’t you come and join your Sunni brothers?’ He was holding a machine gun. When I told him I did not want to be part of it, three men beat me.”

Abu Salah said he had noticed a change in the sermons preached in the Old City where he lived.

“I was brought up a moderate Muslim. Now many of the mosques are Salafi. Some of the speeches I heard called for Syria to be an Islamic emirate.”

The regime has claimed the rebels are “terrorists”, blaming bombings in Damascus and Aleppo on al-Qaeda. Opposition groups claim the bombings were the work of Syrian intelligence, designed to discredit them, and that the regime is turning a blind eye to foreign jihadists entering the country for the same reason.

A bomb in Damascus yesterday injured three people, while three security officers were killed, all in apparent defiance of the current ceasefire. On Monday, scores of civilians in Hama were killed in an assault by regime forces, apparently in retaliation for protests made in the presence of ceasefire monitors.

There is little doubt that the Islamist presence – from the more moderate Muslim Brotherhood to radical Salafis – has grown as the uprising has dragged on. Probably only a small minority among the Islamists are aligned to the wider, al-Qaeda-led militant agenda, but even leaving that minority aside the presence of Salafis and other radical elements threatens the emergence of the pluralistic democracy demanded by the opposition’s leaders.

Sheikh Hashem Minkara, a Salafi leader in northern Lebanon, said he knew followers were crossing to fight ’jihad’ in Syria. “I had a lot of people come to me and tell me they want to go to fight in Syria. I know for sure there is money. The family of FSA fighters from here are being given $330 per month.”

Mrs Kodmani said that there was a difference between “home-grown” Islamists who the SNC was trying to ensure remained subject to their control, and foreign fighters.

She said that without efforts to unify the opposition, such groups would play a bigger role.

From Homs, a prominent activist, Waled al-Fares, issued his own warning: “If the world’s countries leave us and don’t care about us, we will ask all fighting Arabs to enter Syria.” (© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2012. 04/25/12)