Top terrorist reported dead

last updated 8 January 2015

Baghdad

Maverick Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal died this week of gunshot wounds in his home in Baghdad, the Palestinian newspaper Al-Ayyam reported. Abu Nidal was the head of an extremist group that split from Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization in the early 1970s because it considered Arafat too soft on Israel. His group killed and wounded hundreds of people in attacks throughout Europe and the Middle East in the ’70s and ’80s. One such attack, by gunmen at airline ticket desks in Rome and Vienna in 1985, killed 18 people, including five Americans. While he often targeted Israelis and Americans, most of his victims were Arabs—and he had many Palestinian enemies. Arafat long ago condemned him to death in absentia. The Al-Ayyam article claimed the death was suicide, but it did not explain how Abu Nidal managed to shoot himself multiple times.