Los Angeles Times · 10 July 1972

CP-1972-034

Bomb Victim Had Expected Death

BY WILLIAM J. COUGHLIN

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Transcribed from the clipping

BEIRUT — Ghassan Kanafani, the Marxist Palestinian leader who died here Saturday in a bomb explosion that demolished his car in typical gangland style, had a premonition he would be assassinated by the Israelis.

He told an interviewer recently he expected the Israelis to retaliate for the Lod International Airport massacre by killing the leaders of the Palestinian guerrilla movement rather than by a massive counterassault such as the December, 1968, attack on Beirut Airport “Our organization is thoroughly infiltrated by Israeli spies,” he acknowledged.

“They know who we are and where we are at all times.” The death of Kanafani was believed by members of the extremist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, for which he was spokesman, to be the first of a series of assassinations planned by the Israelis in retaliation for the Lod Airport terrorism.

Tied to Possible Feud That belief corresponded to information reaching here from the Israeli side. But it also was possible that Kanafani might have been slain as a result of feuding within the strife-torn PFLP itself, the most active and second largest to Fatah of the fedayeen groups.

The already splintered PFLP split again recently when an antihijacking faction broke away from the leadership of Dr. George Habash and the group which Kanafani represented. Many officials of the PFLP left their homes in Beirut and went underground after the Lod Airport attack on May 30 which killed 27 persons and wounded 78, many of them Puerto Rican pilgrims.

Kanafani, however, continued to be available to foreign correspondents here in his role as official spokesman for the front and as editor and publisher of the PFLP weekly, Al Hadaf. He claimed credit for the PFLP for the Lod Airport attack and boldly defended it.

Writers Denounced Saturday's issue of Al Hadaf denounced Western correspondents based here for reporting that some Palestinians were horrified by the Lod massacre.

Ironically, Kanafani will be buried in Beirut today, the same day that Kozo Okamoto, the only survivor of the three Japanese who shot up Lod Airport, goes on trial in Israel Kanafani and his 1[5 or 6]-year-old niece, Lamice Najem, died in a shattering explosion just after they got into his car in the garage beneath his apartment in the Beirut suburb of Harmiyah.

Police believed the blast was caused by 11 pounds of plastic explosives which detonated when Kanafani switched on the ignition.

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