A Hamas militant who died last week in a mysterious West Bank explosion was a bombmaking expert who had produced chemical weapons for use against Israel, Hamas sources were quoted as saying yesterday.
The sources charged that Israel, recognising the danger posed by the man, Ibrahim Beni Ouda, ordered his assassination.
Hamas carried out a series of suicide bombings and other attacks on Israeli targets in the past decade, most recently the bomb last week in the northern Israeli town of Haderah. They used conventional explosives in these attacks, but Israeli officials have spoken privately of fears that Hamas may be attempting to produce chemical weapons.
Beni Ouda died last Tuesday in the West Bank city of Nablus, when his car exploded. Israeli media reported his death as a possible work accident - suggesting that he had been killed in the process of planning an attack. Palestinian officials acknowledged that he had been freed from a Palestinian jail a day earlier - one of several Hamas militants released for a brief holiday, they said, because they feared Israel intended to bomb the jail.
The Palestinian daily al- Hayat al-Jadida yesterday quoted a Hamas source saying that Beni Ouda had "secretly produced a chemical substance capable of killing thousands of Israelis if placed in the centre of an Israeli city".
The newspaper report said Palestinian police believed Beni Ouda was killed, on Israeli orders, by a "collaborator", who hid a bomb in his car.