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facts about abu nidal.html

45 Facts About Abu Nidal

facts about abu nidal.html1.

Sabri Khalil al-Banna, known by his nom de guerre Abu Nidal, was a Palestinian militant.

2.

Abu Nidal was the founder of Fatah: The Revolutionary Council, a militant Palestinian splinter group more commonly known as the Abu Nidal Organization.

3.

Abu Nidal formed the ANO in October 1974 after splitting from Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction within the Palestine Liberation Organization.

4.

Abu Nidal is believed to have ordered attacks in 20 countries, killing over 300 and injuring over 650 while acting as a freelance contractor.

5.

Abu Nidal died after a shooting in his Baghdad apartment in August 2002.

6.

Abu Nidal owned a summer house in Marseille, France, and another house in Iskenderun, then in Syria and afterwards Turkey, and a number of houses in Palestine itself.

7.

Abu Nidal had been one of the family's maids as a 16-year-old girl.

8.

Abu Nidal's brothers took him out of the mission school and enrolled him instead in a prestigious, private Muslim school in Jerusalem, now known as Umariya Elementary School, which he attended for about two years.

9.

In 1955, Abu Nidal graduated from high school, joined the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party, and began a degree in engineering at Cairo University, but he left after two years without a degree.

10.

Abu Nidal's brother told Melman that Abu Nidal would return to Nablus from Saudi Arabia every year to visit his mother.

11.

Abu Nidal was often in poor health, according to Seale, and tended to dress in zip-up jackets and old trousers, drinking whisky every night in his later years.

12.

Abu Nidal became, writes Seale, a "master of disguises and subterfuge, trusting no one, lonely and self-protective, [living] like a mole, hidden away from public view".

13.

Abu Nidal had been recommended to me as a man of energy and enthusiasm, but he seemed shy when we met.

14.

Abu Nidal was extremely good company, with a sharp tongue and an inclination to dismiss most of humanity as spies and traitors.

15.

Abu Nidal sometimes worked himself up into such a state that he lost all powers of reasoning.

16.

Seale suggests that Abu Nidal's childhood explained his personality, described as chaotic by Abu Iyad and as psychopathic by Issam Sartawi, the late Palestinian heart surgeon.

17.

In Saudi Arabia, Abu Nidal helped found a small group of young Palestinians who called themselves the Palestine Secret Organization.

18.

Abu Nidal returned to Nablus with his wife and family, and joined Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction of the PLO.

19.

In 1968, Abu Iyad appointed him as the Fatah representative in Khartoum, Sudan.

20.

In February 1973, Abu Nidal Daoud was arrested in Jordan for an attempt on King Hussein's life.

21.

On 5 September 1973, five gunmen entered the Saudi embassy in Paris, took 15 hostages, and threatened to blow up the building if Abu Nidal Daoud was not released.

22.

Abu Nidal Daoud was released from prison two weeks later; Seale writes that the Kuwaiti government paid King Hussein $12 million for his release.

23.

Abu Nidal had carried out the operation without Fatah's permission.

24.

Abu Iyad and Mahmoud Abbas, flew to Iraq to reason with Abu Nidal and explain that hostage-taking harmed the movement.

25.

In October 1974, Abu Nidal formed the ANO, calling it Fatah: The Revolutionary Council.

26.

Abu Nidal was invited to Beirut to discuss the death sentence, and was allowed to leave again, but it was clear that he had become persona non grata.

27.

Terrorism experts regard the view that Abu Nidal himself was such an agent as "far-fetched".

28.

Abu Nidal demoted Isa in 1987, believing he had become too close to other figures within the ANO.

29.

Ariel Sharon, then Israel's defence minister, responded three days later by invading Lebanon, where the PLO was based, a reaction that Seale argues Abu Nidal had intended: the Israeli government had been preparing to invade and Abu Nidal provided a pretext.

30.

Sources close to Abu Nidal told Seale that Libyan intelligence had supplied the weapons.

31.

Patrick Seale, Abu Nidal's biographer, wrote of the shootings that their "random cruelty marked them as typical Abu Nidal operations".

32.

Abu Nidal had been about to board an El Al flight from New York to Tel Aviv via London.

33.

Abu Nidal began to move his organization out of Syria to Libya in the summer of 1986, arriving there in March 1987.

34.

Abu Nidal repeatedly took credit during this period for operations in which he had no involvement, including the 1984 Brighton hotel bombing, 1985 Bradford City stadium fire, and 1986 assassination of Zafer al-Masri, the mayor of Nablus.

35.

Abu Nidal's members knew nothing about his daily life, including where he lived.

36.

Abu Nidal himself was said to have visited London using the name Shakar Farhan; a BCCI branch manager, who passed information about the ANO accounts to MI5, reportedly drove him around several stores in London without realizing who he was.

37.

Abu Nidal was using a company called SAS International Trading and Investments in Warsaw as cover for arms deals.

38.

The killer, Hamza Abu Nidal Zaid, confessed that an ANO operative had hired him.

39.

Abu Iyad had known that Abu Nidal nursed a hatred of him, in part because he had kept Abu Nidal out of the PLO.

40.

Abu Nidal was expelled from Libya in 1999 and, in 2002, he returned to Iraq.

41.

On 19 August 2002, the Palestinian newspaper al-Ayyam reported that Abu Nidal had died three days earlier of multiple gunshot wounds at his home in Baghdad, a house the newspaper said was owned by the Mukhabarat, the Iraqi secret service.

42.

Amid this, Abu Nidal rushed into his bedroom and was killed; Palestinian sources told Janes that he had been shot several times.

43.

Janes suggested Saddam Hussein had him killed because he feared Abu Nidal would act against him in the event of an American invasion.

44.

Just before being moved to a more secure location, Abu Nidal asked to be allowed to change his clothing, went into his bedroom and shot himself, the report said.

45.

Abu Nidal was buried on 29 August 2002 in al-Karakh's Islamic cemetery in Baghdad, in a grave marked M7.