PLO official assassinated in south Lebanon (Roundup)

Mar 23, 2009, 14:46 GMT

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.