ISRAEL: Hours after his son was blown to pieces by a car-bomb in Beirut yesterday morning, Ahmed Jibril, leader of a radical Palestinian faction opposed to reconciliation with Israel, predictably accused the Jewish state of responsibility.
Equally predictably, Israel immediately issued a firm denial. Last night a hitherto unknown group, the Lebanese Nationalists' Movement, said to be opposed to Syria's controlling presence in Lebanon and apparently regarding the dead man as a symbol of that presence, claimed it carried out the killing.
Mohammed Jihad Jibril (40), "military operations chief" of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, was blown up by a bomb placed under the driver's seat of his Peugeot as he drove away from a car-park in a busy Beirut shopping district, Lebanese police said.
"We heard a blast," said a neighbour whose flat overlooks the bomb scene. "And we saw someone's hand fly off and land in the yard."
Lebanese police were later reported to have arrested several suspects, one of them a rival PFLP-GC commander, but the dead man's father was adamant that Israel's Mossad intelligence service was to blame.
"The Mossad managed to kill Jihad this time," Ahmed Jibril said in Damascus, where his group has its headquarters, asserting that the Israelis had targeted his son on several previous occasions.
"The Israeli enemy knows he was a serious field commander. He had prayed for a martyr's death."
Mr Jibril's brother, Haled, vowed to avenge his killing.
The Israeli Defence Minister, Mr Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, insisted, however, that Israel had nothing to do with the assassination. "Not everything that blows up in Beirut has a connection with the State of Israel," he said.
The killing of Mr Jibril comes just four months after a similar blast killed another prominent figure in Beirut, the Christian Phalangist leader and former cabinet minister Eli Hobeika - underlining the not-infrequent resort to car-bombing to settle scores in the Lebanese capital.
Mr Jibril, said to have been the PFLP-GC's key representative in Lebanon, responsible for transferring weaponry to supporters in the Palestinian territories, targeting northern Israel with rocket fire from southern Lebanon and liaising with the Hizbullah, was clearly seen by Israel as an enemy.
The PFLP-GC was at odds, too, with Mr Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority, which it accused of selling out the Palestinian cause by signing the Oslo peace accords.
Just a few days ago, Ahmed Jibril called Mr Arafat an Israeli pawn for having consented to the jailing and deporting of Palestinians, wanted by Israel, to resolve month-long sieges in Ramallah and Bethlehem.
Founded in 1968, the PFLP-GC was at the forefront of anti-Israeli attacks a generation ago, including a 1970 bombing of a Swissair flight to Tel Aviv in which 47 passengers and crew were killed. Although initially suspected of involvement in the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am 747 over Lockerbie, Scotland, it has become a marginal force.
But members have been responsible for Katyusha fire across the Lebanese border into Israel, and Ahmed Jibril said it was behind an attempted shipment of weapons to the Palestinian areas last year aboard a ship, the Santorini, which was intercepted by Israel.
Meanwhile in northern Israel yesterday, a Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up but caused no other casualties.
He had attempted to board a bus, got off when he realised it was a private workers' vehicle, and detonated his charges when police, alerted by passers-by, approached him.
On Sunday, another bomber killed three Israelis in the oft-targeted coastal town of Netanya.
Israel alleges that Ahmad Saadat, the head of another radical Palestinian group, the PFLP, orchestrated this attack despite being jailed under British and US supervision in Jericho, and it has asked that he be kept in isolation.
Last night, Israeli officials said the army had thwarted another attempted bombing, arresting a 26-year-old woman in Tulkarm who was poised to carry out a suicide attack.
And Israel's Prime Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon, told Knesset colleagues yesterday that Palestinian bombers arrested three weeks ago had planned to detonate a ton of explosives to try to bring down the Azrieli skyscraper office blocks in Tel Aviv, Israel's tallest buildings.