CIA, Israelis murdered Palestinian activist, PLO says

By Eric Rorich, London Daily Telegraph

Transcribed from the clipping

“ROME — The Palestine Liberation Organization has accused the Central Intelligence Agency and the Israeli Secret Service of the murder of a leading Palestinian activist in a Rome hotel. The PLO said his death will be avenged.

Majjed Abu Sharar, chief PLO information officer, was killed yesterday when a bomb exploded beneath his bed at the Hotel Flora on Rome’s Via Veneto.

He was reported to be in Italy for a conference of writers on Palestinian solidarity, but an unnamed PLO spokesman said Sharar was in Rome to attend a conference of Arab terrorists in a suburban Rome hotel and carried an Algerian passport as a security precaution. In telephone calls to news agencies, a Palestinian splinter group claimed responsibility.

These claims were dismissed ‘as a CIA coverup’ by Abu Iyad, second in command to Al Fatah leader Yasir Arafat. Abu Sharar was a member of the central committee of Al Fatah, the main PLO guerrilla group, and was said to be a close friend of Arafat. Until last year he served as secretary of Al Fatah’s revolutionary council and was in charge of recruitment.

He then became director of the movement’s information office with special responsibility for Palestinian journalists in Israeli-occupied territories. He was registered in the hotel under the name of Abbas Zithouni, 47, supposedly an Algerian living in Beirut.

Rome police at first believed Abu Sharar might have been assembling the bomb in preparation for a terrorist attack when it exploded, but fire brigade experts confirmed last night they found clear evidence the bomb had been placed under Sharar’s bed. A fire caused by the explosion was restricted to Sharar’s room and was quickly brought under control.

A caller who identified himself as a spokesman for the general command of the Assifa ‘storm’ forces said in Beirut, ‘Majjed Abu Sharar and his colleagues have diverted from the proper course of the Palestinian revolution and armed struggle ….

Those people represent treachery and as we have liquidated him we shall liquidate others that have diverted from the sacred course.’ The name Assifa is used by the military wing of Al Fatah but the general command is a breakaway group led by Abu Nidal, a guerrilla who was expelled in 1974 and sentenced to death in absentia.

In return, he vowed to kill the Al Fatah leadership including Arafat. Abu Nidal, who is said to be based in Damascus, has been engaged in a campaign of assassination against prominent PLO representatives whom he regards as backing Arafat’s moves toward moderation and diplomatic activity rather than a military overthrow of Israel.

At an angry Beirut press conference, Abu Iyad accepted that there were differences between the Fatah leadership and Abu Nidal, but he said he was certain that the group was not responsible for Abu Sharar’s death. There was no doubt the CIA and Israeli intelligence were responsible.

Two bomb attacks on Israeli targets near the Hotel Flora the previous night had been set up to distract Italian security authorities from the Abu Sharar killing, he said. Abu Iyad said the the bomb was planted under Abu Sharar’s bed between 10 p.m. and midnight. The blast went off at about 1 a.m.

‘This murder is a follow-up to the United States and Israeli decision to liquidate the leadership of the Palestinian people,’ he added, praising the victim as a martyr who had given his life to the Palestinian cause.”

Context added by this archive

Nine years after a bomb in a car in Beirut killed a Palestinian novelist, a bomb under a bed in Rome kills the man in charge of the PLO’s information office, who was reported to be in Italy for a conference of writers. The paper prints both accounts of why he was there without choosing between them, in consecutive clauses of the same sentence.

Cite this item

"CIA, Israelis murdered Palestinian activist, PLO says," Syracuse Herald Journal, 10 October 1981. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1981-005. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1981-005