Mystery surrounds 'suicide' of Abu Nidal, once a ruthless killer and face of terror

Abu Nidal, the megalomaniac Palestinian renegade whose name became an international byword for the use of indiscriminate violence, has been found dead from shot wounds in his Baghdad apartment, according to Palestinian officials in the occupied territories.

If true, it marks the end of a man whose notoriety once almost rivalled that of Osama bin Laden, a ruthless killer who led the West's most wanted list for years, and whose hands are soaked in the blood of many scores of people from some 20 countries.

The evidence of his death, which has been reported in the past – once by Libya's Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in a Newsweek interview – is incomplete. But reports were persistent enough yesterday to ensure that they made international headlines.

The news was broken by the Palestinian newspaper Al-Ayyam, which said that Abu Nidal, the nom de guerre for 65-year-old Sabri al-Banna, died three days ago. Later in the day, Palestinian officials in the West Bank – men loathed by Abu Nidal for having dealings with Israel – said their sources in Iraq had indeed confirmed his death, although the exact circumstances remained unclear.

The favoured theory was that the ageing killer had shot himself; it is believed he had leukaemia, and had moved to Iraq for treatment from Egypt several years ago. But at least one anonymous Palestinian official was quoted saying that the death was mysterious.

So vicious was Abu Nidal's career as head of an extremist Palestinian splinter group, which broke with Yasser Arafat and his Fatah movement in 1973, that during the 1970s and 1980s few acts of butchery conducted in the name of Middle East politics passed by without his name appearing in the Western press as a leading suspect. Mountains of files are devoted to his name inside the annals of the FBI, CIA, MI6 and Mossad.

His group, the Fatah Revolutionary Council, has been held responsible by the American State Department for more that 100 attacks across the world, in which 280 people were killed. His followers attacked aircraft, hotels and military bases; they killed tourists, worshippers at prayer, diplomats and politicians.

They provided Israel with a flimsy pretext for invading Lebanon in 1982 by shooting and severely injuring Israel's ambassador to London outside the Dorchester hotel, triggering the chain of events that eventually led to Ariel Sharon, then the Defence Minister, being held responsible for the Sabra and Chatila massacres.

In the West, Abu Nidal came to symbolise the evil and incomprehensible face of Arab extremism. But more than half of his group's activities were aimed at Arab or Palestinian rivals, whose perceived offence was to have recognised Israel or, more banally, to have failed to pay his organisation the required protection money.

He is blamed for the killing of two of the first senior Palestinians to push for contacts with Israel, Issam Sartawi and Sa'id Hammami, and of Yasser Arafat's second-in-command in the PLO, Abu Iyad. It is hardly surprising, then, that Mr Arafat came to view Abu Nidal as a sworn enemy, and slapped a death sentence on his head in absentia – a punishment also passed by courts in Lebanon, Italy and Jordan. The list of crimes for which Abu Nidal is blamed is long, spanning two decades: the killing of 18 people in December 1985 in simultaneous attacks on El Al check-in desks in Rome and Vienna; the death a year later of Alec Collett, a British journalist working for Unrwa, the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees; and the death of Kenneth Whitty, a British Council official who was shot dead in Athens in 1984.

In September 1986, his men killed 22 people and wounded 100 during an attempt to hijack a Pan American jumbo jet at Karachi in Pakistan. In the same month, they struck again, this time in Istanbul, killing 22 worshippers at a synagogue. Two years later, they were shedding blood again, this time by opening fire on passengers on a Greek ferry, killing nine.

Born in the Mediterranean port town of Jaffa in 1937, then part of British-ruled Palestine, now part of Israel, Abu Nidal was one of 16 sons in a family of wealthy citrus farmers. In the war that followed the creation of Israel in 1948, they were driven out to the West Bank, an experience that can be assumed to have played a big role in his subsequent hatred of Israel, and in his unwillingness to tolerate any acceptance of the Jewish state's existence. After starting out as a school teacher, he turned to what his supporters portray as revolutionary activities, joining the Arab nationalist Baath party and then – in 1967 – the PLO.

But much of his career had less to do with politics than with extortion, revenge, and serving the interests of the intelligence services of the anti-Western Arab states – including Syria, Libya and Iraq – willing to give him house room.

He ruled his small band of fanatics with paranoid ruthlessness. In October 1988, two of his aides, Atef Abu Bakr and Abd lrahman Isa, broke away and accused Abu Nidal of killing 156 comrades in purges.

In the past decade, he has faded away, becoming a figure of the past whose horrendous activities have now been dwarfed by even worse crimes committed in New York and Washington nearly a year ago. Yesterday, most of the world was ardently hoping that he had finally consigned himself to history. But it was impossible to be absolutely sure.

Abu Nidal's trail of terror

5 January 1978: Said Hammami, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) representative in London, is shot dead in his London office. PLO representatives in Paris, Rome, Madrid, Brussels and Kuwait are murdered.

2 June 1982: Israel's ambassador in London, Shlomo Argov, is critically wounded by gunmen.

25 March 1985: The British writer Alec Collett, on assignment for the UN Relief and Works Agency, is kidnapped near Beirut and executed.

7 August 1985: Thirteen people, including six Britons, are wounded in a bombing at a hotel in Glyfada, a resort near Athens, Greece. A rash of attacks on Britons is seen as pressure to release Abu Nidal men in jail in Britain.

23 November 1985: An Egyptian airliner with 97 passengers is hijacked to Malta by four gunmen. Six passengers are slain before Egyptian commandos storm the plane the next day. Sixty passengers die in shoot-out.

27 December 1985: Eighteen are killed and 120 wounded in attacks on El Al ticket desks at Rome and Vienna airports by seven Abu Nidal gunmen.

6 September 1986: Twenty-two people are killed and six wounded in a machine-gun attack on Neve Shalom synagogue in Istanbul. The group is also blamed for the attempted hijacking of a Pan Am plane at Karachi on 5 September; 22 people are killed and 100 wounded.

11 July 1988: Five gunmen attack the Greek cruise ship City of Poros, killing nine people and wounding 98.

16 January 1991: Abu Nidal guerrillas kill Abu Iyad, the top aide of the PLO leader, Yasser Arafat, in Tunis.