Bomb blast in Rome kills PLO lieutenant

Send this clipping to somebody

Transcribed from the clipping

ROME (AP) — A bomb exploded under the hotel bed of a leader in Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization early today, killing him instantly, police and firemen said. Police and the Rome office of the PLO identified the dead man as Majed abu Sharar, a member of the Central Committee of Arafat’s Fatah Faction, the largest element of the multi-factioned PLO.

They said Sharar was also spokesman for the Unified Information Center of all PLO guerrilla factions. The attack was claimed by “the General Command of al-Assifa forces” in anonymous phone calls to news agencies in Rome and Beirut. The callers said Sharar was killed because he had left the “proper course of the Palestine revolution and the armed struggle.”

The al-Assifa Revolutionary Council is a dissident Palestinian group led by Abu Nidal, who split from the PLO and has strongly criticized Arafat for being too moderate. The group has been linked to the Aug. 29 bombing of a Vienna synagogue in which two people were killed and 20 were injured. The PLO office in Rome claimed Israeli agents murdered Sharar.

Police had first said the dead man blew himself up while working on a plastic explosive bomb. The explosion ripped through Sharar’s fifth-floor room in the Hotel Flora on the fashionable Via Veneto at about 1:00 a.m. (8 p.m. EDT Thursday), police said.

The blast destroyed the room, dislodged a piece of masonry that fell onto a parked car below, and started a brief fire that damaged three other rooms, police said. Nobody else was hurt in the explosion. Firemen said they were sure the bomb was underneath Sharar’s bed because a piece of plaster broke off from the ceiling of the room directly below it.

Police said Sharar was in Rome for an international conference of Palestinian writers, journalists and intellectuals. The conference observed a minute of silence for him today, a PLO spokesmen said. Sharar was traveling with an Algerian passport under the name of Habbas Zithouni, police said. The Rome PLO office said Sharar used the false identity for security reasons.

Sharar, about 40 years old, lived in Beirut, where he was married and had three children. Considered one of the most strident advocates of Marxism in the PLO hierarchy, he was also a literary critic.

How this transcription was made

Masthead not readable on the scan. The label on the slide read: [masthead not on scan] — One clipping, one scan. A partial third column of a different story runs down the right edge and is not transcribed. — No masthead, no date line on this scan. Internal evidence supports a Friday 9 October 1981 paper: the bomb went off “early today” at about 1:00 a.m. Rome time, given as “8 p.m. EDT Thursday”, and the conference “observed a minute of silence for him today.” Abu Sharar was killed in the early hours of 9 October 1981. Not confirmed from the page.

Cite this clipping

"Bomb blast in Rome kills PLO lieutenant," (newspaper unidentified), 9 October 1981. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1981-043. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1981-043