(newspaper unidentified) · 18 October 1972

CP-1972-044

Embassy employe ambushed

Shown from the top. The whole column — 4.6 times taller than it is wide — is in the enlargement.

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Transcribed from the clipping

ROME (UPI)— Police ordered a ntionwide manhunt for the killers of Adel Zuaiter, a 38-year-old Palestinian employee of the Libyan Emnbassy in Rome, identified Tuesday by the Al Fatah guerrilla organization as its representative in Italy. Zuaiter was ambused and shot eight times by two men as he was about to enter the elevator in his apartment building at Monday night.

A Libyan Embassy spokesman said Zuaiter, who had a Jordanian passport, worked as an interpreter there. Police said they were investigating possible conenctions Zuaiter might have had, but refused to comment further. The Roman newspaper Il Messaggero said he was distantly related to Al Fatah leader Yesser Arafat and was well known in Palestinian circles in Italy.

In Beirut, Al Fatah said Zuaiter was the representative of the Palestinian organization in Italy and a “martyr assassinated by Zionist intelligence.” In a statement issued by the Palestinian news agency WAFA, Fatah said Zuaiter was among the first men who had been able to take the “voice of Palestine” to the European public.

“This assassination is part of a Zionist terrorist campaign which is beng carried out all over the world and which condemns the real terrorists,” Fatah said. Police said at leat two men waited for Zuaiter, opening fire when he reached for the elevator door. He stumbled back into the courtuyard where he was fired upon again and where he dropped and died, they said.

Twelve empty pistol shells littered the lobby and courtyard of Zuaiter’s aprtment building near the center of Rome. Police said they found a Rome University identification card dated 1962-63 on his bloodsoaked body.

How this transcription was made

Masthead not readable on the scan. The label on the slide read: [masthead not on clipping] — No masthead or folio line survives on this single-column cut; the top edge carries only the tail of an unrelated item. The body says Al Fatah identified him “Tuesday” and that the shooting was “Monday night,” which puts publication on or after Wednesday 18 October 1972 but does not fix the day. Paper and date are Maria’s label only. — Complete as clipped. This version runs two paragraphs shorter than the other printing of the same UPI story on this slide: it stops at the identification card and omits the Il Messaggero witness paragraph about the light blue Fiat and the closing paragraph giving Zuaiter’s birth in Nablus in 1934.

Cite this clipping

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