Bomb kills PLO official in Rome hotel, police say

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ROME (AP) — A bomb exploded in a Rome hotel late Thursday and killed a spokesman for Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization, police and firemen said. Police and a PLO source in Rome dentified 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.

The source said Sharar was also spokesman for the Unified Information Center of PLO guerrilla factions. Callers identifying themselves as “The General Command of al-Assifa forces” phoned news agencies in Rome and Beirut, and claimed responsibility for the bombing.

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. (7 p.m.

CDT 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. Friday, the conference observed a minute of silence for Sharar, 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.

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. Same AP story as the clipping on this slide’s first scan, rewritten and reordered. — No masthead, no date line on this scan. This version of the AP copy is rewritten for a Central-time paper and says the bomb went off “late Thursday” at “1:00 a.m. (7 p.m. CDT Thursday)”, and that “Friday, the conference observed a minute of silence for Sharar.” Past-tense “Friday” means this cannot be a Friday-morning paper; it is either a Friday-evening edition or a Saturday 10 October paper. Maria’s label of 9 October is possible only if this is an evening edition. FLAGGED — the page does not settle it.

Cite this clipping

"Bomb kills PLO official in Rome hotel, police say," (newspaper unidentified), 9 October 1981. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1981-044. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1981-044