Abu Nidal - Death

Death

After Libyan intelligence operatives were charged with the Lockerbie bombing, Gaddafi tried to distance himself from terrorism. He expelled Abu Nidal, who returned to Iraq where he had planned his first terrorist attack 26 years earlier. The Iraqi government later said Abu Nidal had entered the country using a fake Yemeni passport and was not there with their knowledge, but by 2001, at the latest, he was living there openly, and in defiance of the Jordanian government, whose state security court had sentenced him to death in absentia in 2001 for his role in the 1994 assassination of a Jordanian diplomat in Beirut.

On August 19, 2002, al-Ayyam, the official newspaper of the Palestinian Authority, reported that Abu Nidal had died three days earlier of multiple gunshot wounds in his home in the wealthy al-Masbah neighborhood of al-Jadriyah, Baghdad, where he had lived in a villa owned by the Mukhabarat, the Iraqi secret service.

Iraq's chief of intelligence, Taher Jalil Habbush, held a press conference on August 21, 2002, at which he handed out photographs of Abu Nidal's bloodied body, along with a medical report purportedly showing he had died after a single bullet had entered his mouth and exited his skull. Habbush said that Iraq's internal security force had arrived at Abu Nidal's house to arrest him on suspicion of conspiring with the Kuwaiti and Saudi governments to bring down Saddam Hussein. Saying he needed a change of clothes, Abu Nidal went into his bedroom and shot himself in the mouth, Habbush said. He died eight hours later in intensive care. His brush with Iraqi intelligence apart, he was also believed to have been suffering from leukemia.

Other sources disagree about the cause of death. Palestinian sources told journalists that Abu Nidal had died of multiple gunshot wounds. Marie Colvin and Sonya Murad, writing in The Sunday Times, say he was killed by a hit squad of 30 men from Office 8, the Iraqi Mukhabarat assassination unit. Jane's reported that Iraqi intelligence had been following him for several months, and had found classified documents in his home about a U.S. attack on Iraq. When they arrived to raid his house on August 14 (not August 16, according to Jane's), fighting broke out between Abu Nidal's men and Iraqi intelligence. In the midst of this, Abu Nidal rushed into his bedroom and was killed, though Jane's writes it remains unclear whether he killed himself or was killed by someone else. Jane's sources insist that his body bore several gunshot wounds. Jane's suggests Saddam Hussein had him killed because he feared Abu Nidal would act against him in the event of an American invasion.

In October 2008, a report from the former Iraqi "Special Intelligence Unit M4" was obtained by Robert Fisk, indicating that the Iraqis had been interrogating Abu Nidal as a suspected spy for Kuwait and Egypt, and indirectly for the U.S.; the documents say he had been asked by the Kuwaitis to find links between Saddam and Al-Qaeda. It was shortly after the first series of interrogations, and just before he was to be moved to a more secure location, that he shot himself, the report says. He was buried on August 29, 2002 in al-Karakh's Islamic cemetery in Baghdad, in a grave marked only "M7".