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Jihad Jibril, who was killed in a car-bomb explosion in Beirut Monday.
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Ahmed Jibril, general secretary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, said Monday that Israeli intelligence was behind a car bomb that killed his son, Jihad, in Beirut. An aide to Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer denied "any connection" to the car-bomb attack.
"The Mossad managed to kill Jihad this time," Jibril told reporters, referring to Israeli intelligence. "The Israeli enemy knows he was a serious field commander. He became a martyr like so many who have fallen defending the Palestinian cause."
"Israel had no connection to [the car bomb]," Ben-Eliezer's aide, Yarden Vatikay, said, adding that the defense minister had also denied any link. "As usual, they blame Israel."
Al-Manar, the television station of the Hezbollah guerrilla group which has close links to Jibril's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), said Jibril's son, 40-year-old Jihad, died in the explosion. It said it had received the confirmation from Jibril's headquarters in Damascus, Syria.
A senior PFLP-GC commander suspected of involvement in the assassination was arrested in Beirut, the Al-Jazeera television station reported Monday afternoon. In addition, Lebanese police said that they had arrested three suspects.
Contacted by The Associated Press, Ahmed Jibril's PFLP-GC headquarters in Damascus would not immediately discuss what had happened, but several members privately confirmed Jihad Jibril had been killed.
When asked who was responsible for the assassination, Talal Naji, an aide to Ahmed Jibril, said only: "Israel alone." Another aide pledged to retaliate.
Jihad Jibril was head of military operations for the guerrilla group established by his father in 1968. 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."
The blast occurred at midday on a street off the busy shopping area of Corniche Mazraa. Lebanese police officials said the explosion was caused by a bomb placed under the driver's seat of the Peugeot sedan.
Ambulances, sirens wailing, rushed to the scene of the explosion. Police sealed off the area and opened an investigation.
The blast also damaged neighborhood shops and parked cars but, apart from the driver, there were no other casualties.
Jibril's PFLP-GC is one of the radical Palestinian groups opposed to the peace process, and has close ties to the Hezbollah organization in Lebanon.
Once famed for its guerrilla operations, it has been largely on the sidelines of the Palestinian uprising against Israel that erupted in 2000, but had claimed responsibility for a shipment of weapons aboard the ship Santorini Israel intercepted en route to the West Bank in May of last year.
Ahmed Jibril pledged at that time to send more weapons for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to fight Israel.
Among the atrocities that the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command has been linked to was the attack on the Pan Am flight over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.
Jibril's PFLP-GC also has been at odds for decades with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Most recently, the group has fired across the border on Israel, against the declared Lebanese government policy not to allow Palestinian guerrilla activity from Lebanese territory.
In May 1985, Israel freed some 1,150 Palestinian security detainees, many of whom were affiliated to Jibril's PFLP-GC, in exchange for three IDF soldiers who were taken prisoner in the aftermath of the 1982 battle at Sultan Yakoub.
At a Damascus news conference earlier this month, Jibril said Arafat's decision to do a deal with Israel over Palestinian militants holed up in Bethlehem and to jail accused killers of Israel's tourism minister showed he was a pawn of the Jewish state. |
