Information chief of PLO is slain

Send this clipping to somebody

Transcribed from the clipping

ROME, Italy (UPI) — The information chief of the Palestine Liberation Organization was killed yesterday by a bomb that apparently exploded under his bed in one of Rome's most luxurious hotels. Police said it was a highly professional assassination.

Majed Abu Sharar, chief of the PLO's public relations department, was killed instantly in the explosion shortly before 1 a.m. in his room on the fourth floor of the Flora Hotel on Rome's Via Veneto. A PLO spokesman in Beirut, Lebanon, blamed Israel, calling Abu Sharar a victim of the “homicidal madness of Israeli terrorists.”

However, a hard-line Palestinian group in Beirut claimed responsibility for the assassination, saying it killed Abu Sharar because he had “diverged” from the radical line and had become too moderate. The explosion started a fire and burned Abu Sharar's body beyond recognition and forced scores of tourists and other hotel guests to flee their rooms.

Firemen quickly extinguished the blaze. Police at first theorized that Abu Sharar may have been preparing the bomb for a terrorist attack and that it had exploded prematurely. A bomb blast on Thursday damaged an Israeli tourist office only two blocks from the Flora. However, fire brigade experts said later they found evidence the bomb was rigged under Abu Sharar's bed.

Abu Sharar was registered at the hotel as Abbas Zithouni, 47, an Algerian living in Beirut. A spokesman for the PLO's Rome office conceded Zithouni was really Abu Sharar, also a member of the Central Committee of Al Fatah, the largest guerrilla group headed by Yasser Arafat.

The spokesman said Abu Sharar, in Rome for a conference of Arab journalists, carried the Algerian passport as a security precaution. Al Assifa, a pro-Syrian guerrilla group, telephoned new agencies in Beirut and Rome to claim responsibility. “We have killed the traitor Majed Abu Sharar in Rome.

He and his friends had diverged from the proper path of the Palestinian revolution and armed struggle. They represented the line of surrender,” the caller said. “In the same way we killed Abu Sharar, we will kill all others who seek to compromise the principles of our revolution,” the group said.

How this transcription was made

Masthead not readable on the scan. The label on the slide read: [masthead not on clipping] — Single clipping. The page also carries the top of a "Sydnor &" furniture advertisement at lower right and the start of an unrelated story at the foot of the first column; neither is part of this record. The slide's other image is the Tyler version of the same UPI story and is recorded separately; the two must be read together. — No masthead in frame. The display advertisement filling the lower right reads "Sydnor &" over "Chippenham Pkwy" — Chippenham Parkway is in Richmond, Virginia, which supports Maria's label. That is a reading of an advertisement, not of a masthead. — No printed date. This version says the killing happened "yesterday" where the Tyler version says "Friday", so both point at Saturday 10 October 1981 for publication, matching Maria's label. Year not printed anywhere on this clipping — and unlike the Tyler version, this one does not carry the closing paragraph with its "in 1972", so there is no year on the page at all. — This is the complete story as this paper ran it; it ends on the threat quote, with the Sydnor advertisement directly beneath. Printed as set: "telephoned new agencies" (for news agencies) — the same error appears in the Tyler version on this slide, so it came down the service that way rather than being introduced by either paper. Unlike the Tyler version, this one prints "blamed" correctly and "all others" correctly. — Set over two lines in italic: "Information chief" / "of PLO is slain".

Cite this clipping

"Information chief of PLO is slain," (newspaper unidentified), 10 October 1981. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1981-037. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1981-037