PLO information chief is killed by bomb in Rome hotel room

United Press International

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Transcribed from the clipping

ROME — The information chief of the Palestine Liberation Organization was killed Friday by a bomb that exploded under his bed in one of Rome's most luxurious hotels. Police called the assassination highly professional.

Majed Abu Sharar, chief of the PLO's public-relations department, died when the bomb went off shortly after midnight in his room on the fourth floor of the Flora hotel on Rome's tourist-famed Via Veneto. A PLO spokesman blamed Israel for the attack and called Abu Sharar a victim of the “homicidal madness of Israeli terrorists.”

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

Firemen quickly extinguished the blaze. Police at first theorized Abu Sharar may have been preparing the bomb for a terrorist attack and that it had exploded prematurely. A bomb blast Thursday damaged an Israeli tourist office only two blocks from the Flora hotel. However, fire experts later said they found evidence the bomb had been 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 that Zithouni was really Abu Sharar, the PLO's top information official and a member of the central committee of Al Fatah, the 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 news agencies in Beirut and Rome to claim responsibility for the killing. “We have killed the traitor Majed Abu Sharar in Rome,” the caller said.

“He and his friends had diverged from the proper path of the Palestinian revolution and armed struggle. “They represented the line of surrender. “In the same way we killed Abu Sharar, we wil[l] kill all others who seek to compromise the principle[s] of our revolution.”

How this transcription was made

No masthead on the cut. The page carries a section flag reading 'International' with a check-mark device, which is page furniture, not the paper's name. Attribution rests on Maria's label. — No printed date. The story says the PLO information chief 'was killed Friday' and that a bomb damaged an Israeli tourist office 'Thursday'; Oct. 9 1981 was a Friday, which fits a Saturday Oct. 10 paper. The year is not printed on the cut. — The last three lines of the article sit at the right-hand edge of the scan and the final letters of two lines are lost to the trim: the page as scanned reads 'we wil' and 'the principle'. The bracketed letters are an editorial completion, not something I could read. Everything else is read from magnified crops. The ceiling-fan advertisement filling the right of the clipping is not part of the story. — The words 'International' with a check-mark, set in a ruled box at the top of the second column, are a section flag, not a deck.

Cite this clipping

"PLO information chief is killed by bomb in Rome hotel room," The Arizona Republic, 10 October 1981. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1981-038. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1981-038