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PFLP General Commander’s Son
Assassinated in Car Blast in Beirut
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Ahmad
Jibril |
BEIRUT,
May 20 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - A son of Palestinian
resistance leader Ahmad Jibril, head of the Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), was killed Monday,
may 20, when his car exploded in Beirut, a spokesman for the
Syrian-backed PFLP-GC told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
Spokesman
Abu Rushdi told AFP that the victim was Jihad, born in 1969, one of
the two sons of Ahmad Jibril who was residing in Lebanon.
"The
explosion happened when the driver started his car," a police
officer said earlier. The man, who was blown to pieces, had not been
immediately identified, he added.
Initial
inquiries indicated that some two kilos (4.4 pounds) of explosives had
been placed in the car, an elderly Peugeot 504.
The
blast happened only meters (yards) from a police barracks in west
Beirut's Mama Street, adjoining Mar Elias Boulevard.
Ahmad
Jibril, who normally resides in Damascus, is strongly opposed to any
negotiated settlement between Israel and the Palestinians. His group
has been linked to recent rocket attacks from southern Lebanon into
northern Israel.
Beirut
has condemned the attacks and arrested alleged perpetrators, while
supporting the operations of its own Hezbollah movement, which is also
backed by Syria, against disputed Israeli-held border territory
claimed by Lebanon.
Israeli
daily newspaper, Haartez, claimed that killed Jihad was head of
military operations for Hezbollah.
His
mother, Um Jihad, reached by telephone in her Damascus home, was
weeping and, asked if it was true, said "We are not sure
yet."
Ambulances, sirens wailing, rushed to the scene of the explosion.
Police sealed off the area and opened an investigation, the paper
said.
The blast also damaged neighborhood shops and parked cars, but, apart
from the driver, there were no other casualties.
The last car bomb attack in Lebanon was January 24, when Elie Hobeika,
a former Christian warlord in the country's civil war, was killed.
Hobeika had announced intentions to testify against Israeli Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon in a Belgian court in a case brought against
Sharon over his role in the massacre of up to 2,000 Palestinians in
the Sabra and Shateela camps in Lebanon in 1982.
Fingers
were pointed at Israel, but
no progress in resolving the case has been officially announced. Jibril's
brother Khalid
openly accused Israel of the
assassination.
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