PLO leader assassinated in explosion

Palestinian extremists claiming responsibility

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ROME (AP)— A top Palestine Liberation Organization leader was killed Friday when a bomb exploded under his hotel bed, authorities reported. An extremist Palestinian organization claimed responsibility, but the PLO blamed the CIA and Israeli intelligence.

Police said Majed Abu Sharar, a member of the Central Committee of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah group, one of many factions in the PLO, was killed instantly by the explosion, which destroyed his fifth-floor room in the Hotel Flora on the fashionable Via Veneto about 1 a.m.

The blast also started a fire that damaged three other rooms and knocked loose a piece of masonry that landed on a parked car in the street below. Nobody besides Sharar was reported hurt. Firemen said they could tell the bomb had been under Sharar’s bed because a piece of plaster was blasted off the ceiling of the room directly below.

Anonymous callers to news agencies in Rome and Beirut claimed responsibility in the name of “the General Command of Al-Assifa forces,” and said Sharar, 47, was killed because he had left the “proper course of the Palestine revolution and the armed struggle.”

The Al-Assifa Revolutionary Council is a splinter group led by Abu Nidal, who split from the PLO and accused Arafat of being too moderate in his confrontation with Israel.

In Beirut, PLO security chief Salah Khalaf, better known by the code name Abu Iyad, said at a news conference: “This criminal act is the work of the American Central Intelligence Agency and their tools, the Israeli intelligence services.” Abu Nidal, who has threatened to kill both Abu Iyad and Arafat, now lives in Damascus.

His group has been linked by Austrian authorities to the Aug. 29 bombing of a Vienna synagogue in which two people were killed and 20 injured. “Despite my feelings about Abu Nidal, I am convinced that this time he was not responsible,” Abu Iyad said.

“All other claims of responsibility for the crime only aim at covering up for the American and Israeli intelligence services who have taken a decision to liquidate the high-ranking leadership of the Palestinian revolution.” Police said Sharar was in Rome for an international conference of Palestinian writers, journalists and intellectuals.

He was traveling with an Algerian passport under the name of Habbas Zithouni, authorities said. A PLO spokesman said Sharar used a false identity for security reasons. Sharar was secretary of Fatah’s Revolutionary Council until 1980 and director of the PLO’s unified information services since 1972. He was born in 1936 in Hebron, now part of the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

He was married and had three children. He was elected Fatah Central Committee member in 1980.

How this transcription was made

Masthead not readable on the scan. The label on the slide read: [no masthead on clipping] — Single scan, one cut column; read in three crops at 4.5x–5x. — DISAGREEMENT WITH MARIA'S LABEL ORDER. No masthead or date line on this cut. The lede says the man “was killed Friday” and reports the first police theory and the first claims of responsibility — this is the first-day story, which gives a Saturday 10 October 1981 paper, not the 13th. The Oct 13 label belongs to image 1 on this slide, which carries the Monday autopsy. I have dated from the page and left the paper unattributed.

Cite this clipping

"PLO leader assassinated in explosion," (newspaper unidentified), 10 October 1981. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1981-034. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1981-034