World Assisted
Suicide? In Baghdad, notorious
extremist Abu Nidal meets a violent, mysterious end — one worthy of
his life BY AMANDA RIPLEY
Monday, Aug. 26, 2002 Long before 9/11, the
title of most dangerous terrorist in the world belonged to Abu
Nidal. Unlike Osama bin Laden, he disliked being filmed chatting
about his ideology over a Kalashnikov. He almost never emerged from
the turbid underworld of international crime, and he had no
consistent belief system. He switched allegiances with ease.
Governments actually paid him just to leave their people alone. Even
so, beginning in 1974, he was responsible for 900 murders in 20
nations, according to the U.S. State Department.
But Abu Nidal's legend relied as much on rumor as on his brazen
acts of violence. His story is so riddled with reversals and lies,
it is soap operatic, almost impossible to follow unless seen one
installment at a time. Indeed, his various enemies are still arguing
about whether his death, announced last week by Iraqi officials, was
a murder or a suicide. The Iraqis claim that he shot himself in the
head in his Baghdad quarters when they came to arrest him for spying
for an undisclosed Arab nation. But Arab media reports and Abu
Nidal's followers insist that he died of multiple gunshot wounds —
which would be a remarkable suicidal feat even for a man of Abu
Nidal's ingenuity.
For now, the prevailing theory is that Iraqi officials killed Abu
Nidal, 65, or encouraged one of his Palestinian lieutenants to do
so. In ridding themselves of their former hired gun, a man who never
could be trusted, the Iraqis could have been trying to undermine
U.S. criticism by demonstrating a disdain for terrorism. "Abu Nidal
joined the Iraqi early-retirement program," says Dan Schueftan, a
lecturer at the Israeli Defense College.
Sabri al-Banna (Abu Nidal was his nom de guerre) was 11 when his
affluent family was forced to flee the Arab city of Jaffa, now part
of Israel, ahead of Jewish forces in the 1948 war. As a laborer in
Saudi Arabia in the 1960s, he latched onto politics, joining Yasser
Arafat's Fatah group, which would become the backbone of the
Palestine Liberation Organization. Bouncing between Jordan, Sudan
and Iraq, he rose through the ranks of the P.L.O.
But in 1974 Abu Nidal formally broke with Arafat, protesting his
old comrade's decision to consider diplomacy over violence. That
year, the newly formed Abu Nidal Organization (also known as Fatah
Revolutionary Council) planted a bomb on a TWA plane flying from
Athens to Rome, killing all 88 people on board. Abu Nidal went on to
mastermind attacks on a Jewish school in Antwerp, synagogues in
Vienna and Istanbul, and a Greek tourist ship. In December 1985 his
group ambushed the El Al ticket counters at Rome and Vienna
airports, killing 14 bystanders.
The great irony of his career was that he did more to destabilize
and stigmatize the Palestinians than to cause permanent harm to
Israel — his declared enemy. In the mid-'70s, Abu Nidal was
sentenced to death by the P.L.O. for plotting to kill Arafat.
Between 1978 and 1983, he was responsible for the assassination of
six of the P.L.O.'s most moderate diplomats. In 1982 the attempted
assassination of Israel's ambassador to Britain was attributed to
his group — giving the Israelis a convenient pretext to invade
Lebanon, in which Arafat had set up headquarters, and kick the
P.L.O. out.
During the past decade, the Abu Nidal Organization, splintered by
internal feuds, grew quiet. Abu Nidal was said to be seriously ill.
In 1998, after proving too onerous a political burden to his host,
Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, he resurfaced in Egypt. The next
year, he moved to Iraq, relying on his fragile alliance with Saddam
Hussein.
Despite the questions about how Abu Nidal died, everyone seems
glad to be having the debate. Rumors of his demise started
circulating 18 years ago, when he was first reported to have died in
Baghdad. Now that the end seems certain, "there is a collective sigh
of relief everywhere that he no longer exists," says Abdul Bari
Atwan, editor of the pan-Arab newspaper al-Quds al-Arabi, based in
London. Sometimes the enemy of my enemy is still the enemy.
Reported by Azadeh
Moaveni/Cairo, Matt Rees/Jerusalem and Douglas
Waller/Washington
From the Sep. 02, 2002 issue of TIME
magazine
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