Bomb in hotel kills PLO official

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Rome, Italy (UPI) — 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 said it was a highly professional assassination. Majed Abu Sharar, chief of the PLO's public relations department, died when the bomb went off shortly before 1 a.m. (7 p.m.

EST Thursday) 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, 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 bomb, placed beneath his bed, 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 nightclothes. Firemen quickly extinguished the blaze. Police at first thought 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 hotel. 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 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 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 for the killing. “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 other who seek to compromise the principles of our revolution,” it said.

How this transcription was made

Single scan, four columns of a page-5 strip. Transcribed from 8x crops. — The page rule gives the paper and the folio — “THE INDIANAPOLIS STAR ——— PAGE 5” — but no date. Internal evidence: the PLO official “was killed Friday” at “1 a.m. (7 p.m. EST Thursday),” so this is a Saturday paper. Oct. 10, 1981 was a Saturday. Consistent with Maria's label; the date itself is not printed on the clipping. — “telephoned new agencies” (for “news agencies”) and “we will kill all other who seek” (for “all others”). Both verified at 8x and kept as set.

Cite this clipping

"Bomb in hotel kills PLO official," Indianapolis Star, 10 October 1981, p. 5. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1981-040. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1981-040