Posted on 05/23/2002 3:31:43 PM PDT by knighthawk
A sombre Ahmed Jibril in Damascus said his son Jihad, who was assassinated earlier this week, was a martyr and vowed to keep up the struggle against Israel.
The head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine- General Command, PFLP-GC, was also quoted as accusing Jordanian and US intelligence services of cooperating with Israel in assassinating his son in a car bomb in Beirut's Mar Elias neighborhood.
Mohammad Jihad Ahmed Jibril was killed in Beirut on Monday in a bomb explosion that ripped through his car tearing him to shreds. Ahmed Jibril had accused Israel's Mossad intelligence service of killing his son.
An aide to Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer denied the accusation. Osama Hamdan, the representative of the Palestinian Hamas movement in Lebanon said his group was now preparing a quote special response to avenge what he said was Israeli assassinations of Palestinian resistance leaders.
The remains of Jihad's body were carried through the streets of the Burj Barajneh refugee camp in Beirut, before it was transported to Damascus, where it will be buried on Wednesday. The younger Jibril was an official at the PFLP-GC.
The Damascus-based group is part of an alliance of Palestinian factions based in Syria. It opposes Palestinian President Yasser Arafat for negotiating a peace with Israel under the 1993 Oslo accords.
Israeli media reports said Jihad Jibril was involved in the transportation of arms and explosives from Lebanon to Palestinian activists in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Jihad Jibril, who will be buried in Damascus, led the PFLP- GC's military operations in the occupied territories and abroad.
Lebanese authorities have said they had arrested three people in connection with the blast but they did not identify them. A previously unknown group, the "Movement of Lebanese Nationalists," claimed Jihad's killing in a statement faxed to AFP in Nicosia.
The previously-unknown group identified itself as anti-Syrian and vowed to carry out similar attacks in the future.
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