IRAQ: Abu Nidal, one the world's most notorious terrorists, has been shot dead - apparently by himself. Michael Jansen reports
According to the Palestinian newspaper al-Ayyam, Nidal's body was found in his flat in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad. He died from gunshot wounds late last week. He was 65 and had cancer.
Some sources claimed last night that he shot himself as an Iraqi force tried to arrest him. However, it was not clear how, if he killed himself, he apparently had more than one gunshot wound.
The Palestinian embassy in Baghdad has refused to have anything to do with his body or to comment on his death, an unnamed relative told the newspaper. "This should surprise no one," a Palestinian diplomat remarked. "Abu Nidal targeted Palestinians, not Israelis."
In a career spanning almost 30 years, Nidal and those answering to him were responsible for murdering or maiming some 900 people, according to some assessments. Nidal, a nom de guerre, was born Sabri al-Banna in May 1937 in the port of Jaffa on the Mediterranean. He was the 12th child of a landowner whose wealth came from the orange groves which surrounded the town. He was shunned by his half-brothers and sisters and received little formal education.
As a young man, he joined the secular nationalist Ba'ath party but then left it to form his own Palestinian group which finally merged with the Fatah movement, founded by Mr Yasser Arafat.
After 1967, an associate, Abu Ali Shaheen, said of him, Nidal adopted the gun as his ideology in the belief that "only the gun" could liberate Palestine. He was never known to have fired the gun he carried. In late 1968 he persuaded Abu Iyad to post him as Fateh's envoy to Sudan, where he cultivated relations with Col Ja'far al-Numeiri, the officer who had seized power in Khartoum.
In 1970 he was sent as the Palestine Liberation Organisation's representative to Baghdad. His mission was to persuade the Iraqis to intervene in the expected showdown between PLO guerrillas and the Jordanian authorities.
He failed, but when he tried to explain to Iyad that Baghdad did not agree because of fears for the regime, Nidal was accused of switching allegiance. Thereafter, he was never entirely trusted by the PLO leadership.
His first terrorist act was in September 1973. His followers took 13 people hostage in the Saudi embassy in Paris and threatened to blow it up if the Jordanians did not release a senior Fatah figure.
The Iraqis apparently asked him to mount the operation on their behalf, transforming the PLO's envoy into a hired hit man who was used by his sponsors for inter-Arab warfare.
Only once did his men mount an operation against Israel: in 1982 against its ambassador in London.
Following the PLO's recognition by the Arabs as the "sole representative of the Palestinian people", the leadership abandoned the armed struggle and opted for a negotiated settlement. Baghdad rejected this policy. Nidal, an arch rejectionist, mutinied against the PLO.
He was officially removed from his post and became a loose cannon. Nidal responded by plotting the assassination of Mr Arafat's associate Abu Mazen (Mahmud Abbas).
Fatah's Revolutionary Council sentenced Nidal to death. Between 1978 and 1988, he retaliated by killing 16 of Mr Arafat's men. From 1974 to 1983, he enjoyed Iraq's patronage but then was ousted by the Iraqi president, Mr Saddam Hussein. From 1981-87, he was sponsored by Syria, then Libya. By the time his relationship with Tripoli was severed in the early 1990s, he was a pariah.