Beirut - A Palestine Liberation Organisation official and
four of his bodyguards were killed Monday when a roadside bomb
targeted their convoy near a Palestinian refugee camp in southern
Lebanon, Lebanese army and Palestinian sources said.
Kamal Medhat, assistant to PLO representative in Lebanon Abbas
Zaki, was killed in the blast near the Miyeh Miyeh camp on the
outskirts of the port city of Sidon.
Palestinian factions inside Ain el-Hilweh and Miyeh Miyeh camps
went on the alert while the Lebanese army took strong security
measures in the vicinity of the shantytowns.
Hamas Movement Representative in Lebanon Osama Hamdan said: 'All
enemies of Palestinians including Israel benefit from Colonel (Kamal)
Medhat's assassination, particularly when he played a central part in
the Palestinian reconciliation process.'
Medhat, in a interview during the Gaza-Israeli war, had said:
'What is currently taking place in Gaza, where over 1,000 people have
been injured and hundreds others killed, is a massacre against the
Palestinian people and can be qualified as a crime against humanity.'
The late PLO official, who was also the head of the intelligence
branch of the mainstream Fatah party in Lebanon, stressed that Israel
was benefitting from the internal divisions of the Palestinians who
ought to unite in the face of a common enemy.
Abbas Zaki, the PLO representative in Lebanon, to whom Medhat was
a righthand man, said Medhat's killing was 'an act of terrorism and
it is a great loss to all the Palestinians.'
Zaki called called on Palestinians refugees and the PLO
supporters to maintain calm following the assassination of Medhat,
and for quick measures to find the assassins.
A Lebanese army source told the German Press Agency dpa earlier
that the blast hurled Medhat's car into a nearby valley, killing him
and his bodyguards instantly.
'Kamal Medhat was killed along with four of his bodyguards when a
roadside bomb exploded as his convoy drove by, near the entrance to
the camp,' said Munir Maqdah, in charge of security at Lebanon's 12
refugee camps.
TV footage showed Medhat's vehicle plunged into a large crater
formed by the force of the explosion.
Kamal Medhat - otherwise known as Brigadier Kamal Naji and later
promoted to colonel - had been in charge over the past few years of
the situation inside the Palestinian camp of Ain El Hilweh camp,
biggest camp in southern Lebanon and which has witnessed several
clashes between the mainstream Fatah movement and Hamas.
There are some 367,000 Palestinian refugees living in 12 camps
across Lebanon.
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