Abu Nidal

Sabri Khalil al-Banna (Arabic: صبري خليل البنا, May 1937 – August 16, 2002), known as Abu Nidal (أبو نضال) was the founder of Fatah – The Revolutionary Council (فتح المجلس الثوري), a Palestinian military separatist group commonly known as the Abu Nidal Organization (NAO). At the height of its power, between 1970 and 1980, the NAO was widely regarded as one of the most ruthless Palestinian groups.

Abu Nidal ("Father of Struggle") formed the NAO in October 1974 after his split from Yasir Arafat's Fatah faction within the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Acting as an independent contractor, Abu Nidal is believed to have ordered attacks in 20 countries killing more than 300 and injuring more than 650 people. The group's operations include the attacks on Rome and Vienna Airports on December 27, 1985, when gunmen opened fire on passengers with simultaneous shootings at El Al ticket counters, killing 20 passengers.

Abu Nidal died after a shooting in his Baghdad apartment in August 2002. Palestinian sources believe he was killed on the orders of Saddam Hussein, but Iraqi authorities insisted he had committed suicide during interrogation.

Early Age

Family and early education

Abu Nidal was born in Jaffa, where he was raised in a large stone house near the beach.

Abu Nidal was born in May 1937 in Jaffa, on the Mediterranean coast of what was then the British Mandate of Palestine. His father, the Hajj Khalil al-Banna, owned 6,000 acres (24 km²) of orange groves located between Jaffa and Majdal, present-day Ashkelon in Israel. The family lived in a luxurious three-story stone house near the beach., later used as the Israeli Military Court. Muhammad Khalil al-Banna, Abu Nidal's brother, told Yossi Melman:

My father was the richest man in Palestine. It marketed approximately 10% of all citrus crops sent from Palestine to Europe - especially to England and Germany. He owned a summer house in Marseille, France, and another house in Iskenderun, in Syria, Turkey and a number of houses in Palestine itself. Most of the time we live in Jaffa. Our house had about twenty rooms, and we, the children, could go down to swim in the sea. We also had stables with Arab horses, and one of our houses in Ascalón even had a large pool. I think we should have been the only family in Palestine with a private pool.

Khalil al-Banna's wealth allowed him to have several wives. According to Abu Nidal in an interview with Der Spiegel , his father had 13 wives, 17 sons and eight daughters. Melman writes that Abu Nidal's mother was the eighth woman, and that she had been one of the family's servants, a 16-year-old Alawite girl. The family did not approve of the marriage, according to Patrick Seale, and as a result, Abu Nidal, Khalil's twelfth son, was reportedly vilified by his older siblings although they later mended their relations.

In 1944 or 1945 his father sent him to Collège des Frères, a French mission school in Jaffa, which he attended for a year. His father died in 1945, when Abu Nidal was seven, and the family expelled his mother from home. His siblings took him out of school and enrolled him in a prestigious Muslim private school in Jerusalem, now known as the Umariya Elementary School. Abu Nidal attended for about two years.

1948: Partition of Palestine and Nakba

On November 29, 1947, the United Nations decided to partition Palestine into an Arab and Jewish state. Fighting broke out immediately and the disruption of the citrus business affected the family's income. There were food shortages in Jaffa, as well as truck bombings and a mortar barrage by the Irgun. Melman writes that the family at -Banna had had good relations with the Jewish community, but it was war time and relations did not help them. Abu Nidal's brother told Melman:

My father was a close friend of Avraham Shapira, one of the founders of Hashomer, the Jewish Self-Defense Organization. He could visit him [Shapira] at his house in Petah Tikva or Shapira riding his horse could visit our house in Jaffa. I also remember how we visited Dr. Weizmann [after the first president of Israel] at his house in Rehovot.

Just before Jaffa was conquered by Israeli troops in April 1948, the family fled to their home near Majdal, but Jewish militias arrived there too and they had to flee again to the Bureij refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, then under Egyptian control. Melman writes that the family spent nine months living in tents, relying on UNRWA for allotment of oil, rice and potatoes. The experience had a powerful effect on Abu Nidal.

Moving to Nablus and Saudi Arabia

The al-Banna family's business experience and the money they had managed to take with them meant they could set themselves up in business again, Melman writes. Their orange groves, however, were gone, now part of the State of Israel, which had declared its independence on May 14, 1948. The family moved to Nablus in the West Bank, then under Jordanian control. Abu Nidal graduated from high school there in 1955 and joined the Baath Party Arab Nationalist. He began an engineering degree at Cairo University but dropped out without a degree after two years.

In 1960 he went to Saudi Arabia, where he settled as a painter and electrician and worked as a casual laborer for Aramco. He remained close to his mother; Her brother told Melman that Abu Nidal returned to Nablus from Saudi Arabia every year to visit her. It was during one such visit in 1962 that he met his wife, whose family had also fled Jaffa. The couple had a son and two daughters.

Personality

Abu Nidal was often in poor health, according to Seale, and tended to dress in zip-up jackets and old trousers, drinking whiskey every night in his later years. He became, writes Seale, a "master of disguise and subterfuge, trusting no one, reclusive and self-protective, [living] like a mole, hidden from public view." Acquaintances of him said that he was capable of hard work and had a knack for finances. Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad), the Fatah deputy who was assassinated by the NAO in 1991, met him in the late 1960s, when he took Abu Nidal under his wing. protection. He told Seale:

He had been recommended to me as a man of energy and enthusiasm, but he seemed shy when we first met. It wasn't until I met him more than I realized other traits. He was extremely good company, with a sharp tongue and an inclination to reject most of humanity as spies and traitors. I really liked that! I discovered that he was very ambitious, perhaps more than his abilities guaranteed, and also very temperamental Sometimes he worked on such a grenade that he came to such a state that he lost all the powers of reasoning.

Seale suggests that Abu Nidal's childhood explained his personality, described as chaotic by Abu Iyad and psychopathic by Issam Sartawi, the late Palestinian heart surgeon. The contempt of his brothers, the loss of his father, and the removal of his mother of the family's house when she was seven years old, after the loss of her home and the conflict with Israel, created a mental world of scenarios and counter-scenarios, reflected in her tyrannical leadership of the NAO. Members' wives (a group of males) were not allowed to befriend each other, and Abu Nidal's wife was expected to live in isolation without friends.

Political life

Impex, Black September

King Hussein of Jordan

In Saudi Arabia, Abu Nidal helped found a small group of young politicians calling themselves the Palestinian Secret Organization. Activism cost him his job and his home: Aramco fired him and the Saudi government jailed him. He later he was expelled.

He returned to Nablus with his wife and family and joined Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction of the PLO. Working in a job without specialization; he was engaged in Palestinian politics, but not particularly active, until Israel won the Six-Day War in 1967, capturing the Golan Heights, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. Melman writes that “the entry of the Israeli Defense Forces tanks into Nablus was a traumatic experience for him. This conquest roused him to action."

He moved to Amman, Jordan, creating a trading company called Impex. Fatah asked him to choose a nom de guerre, nom de guerre, and he chose Abu Nidal ("Father of la Lucha") after his son, Nidal; it is customary in the Arab world for men to call themselves "father of" (Abu), followed by the name of his first child. He was described, by those who knew him at the time, as a well-organized leader, not a guerrilla; During the fighting between the Palestinian Fedayeen and King Hussein's troops, he stayed in his office.

Impex became a stronghold for Fatah, serving as a meeting place and a conduit for funds. This became a hallmark of Abu Nidal's career. NAO-controlled companies made him a wealthy man through involvement in legitimate businesses, while he acted as a cover for arms deals and mercenary activities. Abu-Iyad appointed him in 1968 as Fatah's representative in Khartoum, Sudan, then (at Abu Nidal's insistence), two months before Black September, when for more than 10 days the fight against King Hussein's army drove the Palestinians fedayeen out of Jordan, with the loss of thousands of lives. Seale writes that Abu Nidal's absence from Jordan during this period, when it was clear that King Hussein was about to move against the Palestinians, raised suspicions within the movement that Abu Nidal was interested only in saving himself.

First Operation

Mahmoud Abbas, President of the State of Palestine.

Shortly after Black September, Abu Nidal began accusing the PLO of cowardice on his Voice of Palestine radio station. In Iraq for having accepted a ceasefire with Hussein. During the Third Fatah Congress in Damascus in 1971, Abu Nidal joined Palestinian activist and writer Naji Alloush and Abu Daoud (leader of the Black September Organization responsible for the Massacre of Munich in 1972), calling for more democracy within Fatah and revenge against King Hussein.

In February 1973, Abu Daoud was arrested in Jordan for an attempt on the life of King Hussein. This led to Abu Nidal's first operation, dubbed Al-Iqab ("the punishment"), when on 5 September five gunmen entered the Saudi Embassy in Paris, took 15 hostages and threatened to blow up the building if Abu Daoud were not released. The gunmen flew two days later to Kuwait on a Syrian Airways flight, still holding five hostages, then to Riyadh, threatening to throw the hostages out of the aircraft. They surrendered and released the hostages on September 8. Abu Daoud was released from prison two weeks later; Seale writes that the Kuwaiti government paid King Hussein $12 million for his release.

On the day of the attack, 56 heads of state gathered in Algiers for the 4th conference of the Non-Aligned Movement. According to Seale, the Saudi Embassy operation had been entrusted to the Iraqi President, Ahmed Hasan al-Bakr, as a diversion since he was jealous of Algeria hosting the conference. Seale writes that one of the hijackers admitted that he had been told that he would fly with the hostages until the conference was over.

Abu Nidal had carried out this operation without the permission of Fatah. Abu Iyad (Arafat's lieutenant) and Mahmoud Abbas (later the president of the State of Palestine), flew to Iraq to convince Abu Nidal to take it over. of hostages hurt the movement. Abu Iyad told Seale that an Iraqi official at the meeting said: "Why are you attacking Abu Nidal? The operation was ours! We asked him to set it up for us". Abbas was furious and walked out of the meeting with the other PLO delegates. From that point on, Seale writes, the PLO considered Abu Nidal to be under Iraq's control.

Expulsion of Fatah

Two months later, in November 1973 (just after the Yom Kippur War in October), the NAO hijacked KLM Flight 861, this time using the name Arab Nationalist Youth Organization. Fatah had been discussing attending a peace conference in Geneva, the hijacking was intended to warn them not to go ahead with it. In response, in July 1974, Arafat expelled Abu Nidal from Fatah.

In October 1974, Abu Nidal formed the NAO, calling Fatah: The Revolutionary Council. In November of that year, a Fatah court sentenced him to death in absentia for the attempted assassination of Mahmoud Abbas. Seale writes that it is unlikely that Abu Nidal intended to kill Abbas, and just as unlikely that Fatah wanted to kill Abu Nidal. He 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. As a result, the Iraqis gave him Fatah assets. in Iraq, including a training camp, farm, newspaper, radio, passports, overseas scholarships and $15 million worth of Chinese weapons. He too received the regular aid to the PLO from Iraq: about $150,000 a month and a lump sum of $3-5 million.

NAO

Nature of the organization

In addition to Fatah: The Revolutionary Council, the NAO uses various names, including the Palestinian National Liberation Movement, Black June (for actions against Syria), Black September (for actions against Jordan), the Arab Revolutionary Brigades, the Revolutionary Organization of Muslim Socialists, the Egyptian Revolution, Revolutionary Egypt, Al-Asifa ("The Storm", a name also used by Fatah), Al-Iqab ("The Punishment"), and the Arab Nationalist Youth Organization.

The group had a maximum of 500 members, chosen from among young men in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, who were promised a good salary and help with caring for their families. They would be sent to training camps in any NAO host country at the time (Syria, Iraq or Libya) and later organized into small cells. Once inside, As`ad AbuKhalil and Michael Fischbach write, they were not allowed to leave the group. The group assumed full control over the affiliation. One of the members, who spoke to Patrick Seale, said before being sent abroad: "If we say 'Drink alcohol,'" you do. We do say: "Marry," find a woman and marry her. We do say: "Don't have children," you must obey. If we say: "Go and kill King Hussein," you must be ready to sacrifice yourself!"

Seale writes that recruits were asked to write down their life stories, including the names and addresses of family and friends, then sign a paper saying they agreed to their execution if they were found to have intelligence connections. If suspected, they could be asked to rewrite the full story, without discrepancies. The NAO newspaper Filastin al-Thawra regularly announced the execution of traitors.

Justice Revolution Commission

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s there were reports of purges. Some 600 NAO members died in Lebanon and Libya, including 171 in one night in November 1987, when they were lined up, shot and thrown into a mass grave. Dozens were kidnapped in Syria and died in the Badawi refugee camp. Most of the extermination decisions, Abu Daoud told Seale, were made by Abu Nidal "in the middle of the night, after he had finished off an entire bottle of whiskey." The purges led to the defection in 1989 of Atif Abu Bakr, head of the NAO Political Directorate, who would return to Fatah.

Members were routinely tortured by the "Committee for Revolutionary Justice" until they confessed disloyalty. Seale writes that reports of torture include hanging a man naked, whipping him unconscious, waking him with cold water, and then rubbing salt or chili powder on his wounds. A naked prisoner would be forced to stand inside a car tire with his legs and bottom in the air and then be whipped, wounded, rubbed with salt, and woken up with cold water. A member's testicles could be fried in oil or dripped with melted plastic onto the skin. Between interrogations, detainees would be tied up in small cells. If the cells were full, Seale writes, they could be buried with a pipe in their mouths for air and water; and if Abu Nidal wanted them dead, a bullet was fired from the tube.

Intelligence Directorate

The Intelligence Directorate was formed in 1985 to oversee special operations. It had four sub-committees: the Special Missions Committee, the Foreign Intelligence Committee, the Counter-Intelligence Committee, and the Lebanon Committee. Led by Abd al-Rahman Isa, the longest-serving member of the NAO - Seale writes that Isa was unshaven and bad-looking, but charming and persuasive - the Directorate maintained 30-40 people who guarded the weapons caches of the OAN in several countries. In addition, this Directorate trained the personnel, took care of their passports and visas, and reviewed security at airports and seaports. Members were not allowed to visit each other and no one outside the Directorate was to know that they were members.

Isa was deposed in 1987, because Abu Nidal believed that he had become too close to other figures within the NAO. Always ready to punish members by humiliating, Abu Nidal insisted that he remain in the Intelligence Directorate, forcing him to work for his former subordinates, who Seale claimed were ordered to treat him with contempt.

Special Missions Committee

The job of the Commission for Special Missions was to choose targets. It had started as the Military Committee, headed by Naji Abu al-Fawaris, which had led the attack on Heinz Nittel, head of the Israel-Israel Friendship League. Austria, who was shot dead in 1981. In 1982 the committee changed its name to the Committee on Special Missions, headed by Dr. Ghassan al-Ali, who was born in the West Bank and educated in England, where he earned a bachelor's and master's degree in chemistry, and married a British woman (later divorced). A former NAO member told Seale that Ali favored "the most extreme and reckless operations."

Operations and Relations

Shlomo Argov

Shlomo Argov was shot in the head when the Dorchester Hotel, Park Lane, London came out.

On June 3, 1982, NAO operative Hussein Ghassan Said shot Israeli Ambassador to Britain, Shlomo Argov, once in the head as he was leaving the Dorchester Hotel in London. Said was accompanied by Nawaf al-Rosan, an Iraqi intelligence officer, and Marwan al-Banna, Abu Nidal's cousin. Argov survived, but spent three months in a coma and disabled for the rest of his life, until his death in February 2003. The PLO quickly denied responsibility for the bombing.

Ariel Sharon, then Israel's defense minister, responded three days later by invading Lebanon, where the PLO was founded, a reaction Seale Abu Nidal says he had anticipated. The Israeli government had been preparing to invade and Abu Nidal only provided them with a pretext. In October 1985, Der Spiegel published that after the assassination attempt on Argov, when he knew that Israel wanted to attack the PLO in Lebanon, he made it appear that he was working for the Israelis, in the opinion of Yasser Arafat. He replied:

What Arafat says about me doesn't bother me. Not only him, but also a whole list of Arab and global politicians say I'm a Zionist agent or the CIA. Others claim that I am a mercenary of the French secret services and the Soviet KGB. The last rumor is I'm a Jomeini agent. For some time they said we were spies of the Iraqi government. Now they say we're Syrian agents. Many psychologists and sociologists in the Soviet bloc tried to investigate this man, Abu Nidal. They wanted to find a weak point in their character. The result was zero.

Rome and Vienna

Abu Nidal's most infamous operation was the 1985 attack on the airports of Rome and Vienna. On December 27, at 08:15 GMT, four gunmen opened fire at the El Al counter at the airport Leonardo Da Vinci International in Rome, killing 16 and injuring 99 people. At Vienna International Airport a few minutes later, three men threw grenades at passengers waiting to check in for a flight to Tel Aviv, killing four and injuring 39 people. Seale writes that Abu Nidal's men had been informed that the people in civilian clothes at the check-in counter were Israeli pilots returning from a training mission.

Austria and Italy had participated in the attempt to organize peace talks. Sources close to Abu Nidal told Seale that Libyan intelligence had supplied the weapons. The damage to the PLO was enormous, according to Abu Iyad, Arafat's lieutenant. Most people in the West, and even many Arabs, couldn't tell the difference between the NAO and Fatah, he said. "When these horrible things happen, ordinary people start to think that all Palestinians are criminals."

US bombardment of Libya

The 48th plane Tactical Fighter Wing F-111F takeoff from the Royal Air Force Lakenheath in England to bomb Libya, April 14, 1986

On April 15, 1986, the United States launched bombing raids from British bases against Tripoli and Benghazi, killing around 100 people, in retaliation for the bombing of a nightclub in Berlin used by United States service personnel. The reported dead included Hanna Gaddafi, the adoptive daughter of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi; two of her other children were injured.

British journalist Alec Collett, who had been kidnapped in Beirut in March, was hanged after airstrikes, reportedly by NAO agents; His remains were found in the Beca Valley, in November 2009. The bodies of two British teachers, Leigh Douglas and Philip Padfield, and that of the American, Peter Kilburn, were found in a town near Beirut on April 17; Arab fedayeen cells, a name linked to Abu Nidal, claimed responsibility.

The Hindawi Incident

On April 17, 1986 – the day the bodies of two British and American teachers were found in Beirut, and John McCarthy was kidnapped – Anne Marie Murphy, an Irish waitress, was discovered at Heathrow airport with a bomb Semtex in the false bottom of one of her bags. She had been about to board an El Al flight from New York to Tel Aviv, via London. Her bag had been packed by her Jordanian boyfriend Nizar Hindawi, who had said that he would meet her in Israel where they were to be married.

According to Melman, Abu Nidal had recommended Hindawi to Syrian intelligence. Seale writes that the bomb had been manufactured by Abu Nidal's Technical Committee, which had delivered the bomb to Syrian intelligence air force. It was sent to London in a diplomatic bag and given to Hindawi. According to Seale, the attack was believed to be in response to Israel's intervention in grounding a plane, two months earlier, carrying Syrian officials from Damascus and which Israel had assumed was carrying high-level Palestinians.

Pan Am Flight 73

On September 5, 1986, four NAO gunmen hijacked Pan Am Flight 73 at Karachi Airport on its way from Mumbai to New York, detaining 389 passengers and the crew for 16 hours on the runway, before detonating grenades inside the cabin. Neerja Bhanot, the main flight attendant, was able to open an emergency door where most of the passengers escaped; 20 were killed, including Bhanot, and 120 were injured. The London Times reported in March 2004 that Libya was behind the hijacking.

Relationship with Gaddafi

Abu Nidal began to mobilize his organization from Syria to Libya in the summer of 1986, arriving in March 1987. In June of that same year the Syrian government expelled him, partly due to the Hindawi Incident and the hijacking of Pan Am Flight 73.

He took several occasions of credit during this period for operations in which he had no part, including the Brighton Hotel bombing in 1984, the Bradford City Stadium fire in 1985, and the assassination of Zafir al-Masri in 1986, the mayor of Nablus (assassinated by the PFLP, according to Seale). He was also implicated behind the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster by publishing a congratulatory note in OAN magazine, Seale writes.

Abu Nidal and Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi reportedly became close friends, with what Marie Colvin and Sonya Murad called a "dangerous combination of an inferiority complex mixed with the belief that he was a man of great destiny." The relationship gave Abu Nidal the role of patron and Gaddafi the role of mercenary. Seale reports that Libya brought out the worst in Abu Nidal. He did not allow even the highest ranking NAO members to socialize with others; all meetings had to be reported to him. All passports had to be surrendered. No one was allowed to travel without his permission. Ordinary members were not allowed to have phones and only high-ranking members were allowed to make only local calls.His members did not know where he lived and did not know anything about his daily life. If he wanted to entertain himself, Seale writes, he would go to another member's house.

According to Abu Bakr, speaking to Al Hayatt in 2002, Abu Nidal said he was behind the Ambush on Pan Am Flight 103, which blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland, December 21, 1988; a former head of Security for Libyan Arab Airlines who would later be convicted. Abu Nidal spoke of Lockerbie, according to Seale: "We have some involvement in this matter, but if anyone even mentions it, I'm going to kill him with my bare hands!" !&#3. 4; Seale writes that the OAN seemed to have no connection to her; one of Abu Nidal's associates told him: "If an American soldier stumbled into some corner of the world, Abu Nidal would instantly claim it as his own work."

Bank Accounts in BCCI

In the late 1980s, British intelligence learned that the NAO had accounts with the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) in London. BCCI was closed in July 1991 by banking regulators in six countries after evidence emerged proving widespread fraud. Abu Nidal himself was said to have visited London, under the name Shakar Farhan, to a BCCI branch manager, who leaked information about the OAN to MI5 and according to reports She reportedly took him around various shops in London without realizing who he was. Abu Nidal was using a company called SAS International Trading and Investments in Warsaw as a cover for arms transactions. company operations included buying riot control weapons, ostensibly for Syria, then when the British denied it an export license to Syria, exporting them to an African state; in fact half of the shipment went to the East German police and the other half to Abu Nidal.

Abu Iyad assassination

On January 14, 1991 in Tunis, the night before US forces moved into Kuwait, the NAO assassinated Abu Iyad, PLO Intelligence Chief, along with Abu al-Hol, Fatah Security Chief, and Fakhri al-Umari, another Fatah aide; the three men were shot at Abu Iyad's house. The assassin, Hamza Abu Zaid, confessed that he had been hired by a NAO operative. When he shot Abu Iyad, he reportedly yelled at him: " Let Atif Abu Bakr help you now!", a reference to the high-ranking OAN member who had left the group in 1989, and whom Abu Nidal believes had been planted in the OAN by Abu Iyad as a spy. Abu Iyad had known that Abu Nidal had a hatred against him, partly because he had driven Abu Nidal away from the PLO. But the real reason for the hatred, Abu Iyad told Seale, was that he had protected Abu Nidal in his early years within the movement. Given his personality, Abu Nidal could not acknowledge that debt. Seale writes that the murder "must therefore be seen as the final solution to old scores."

Death

After Libyan intelligence operatives were accused of the Lockerbie bombing, Gaddafi tried to distance himself from terrorism. Abu Nidal was expelled from Libya in 1999, and in 2002 he returned to Iraq; the Iraqi government later said that he had entered the country with a Yemeni passport and a false name.

On August 19, 2002, the Palestinian daily Al Ayyam reported that Abu Nidal had died three days earlier from multiple gunshot wounds in his Baghdad home, a home the paper said was owned by the Mukhabarat, the Iraqi Secret Service. Two days later Iraqi Intelligence Chief Taher Jalil Habbush handed over photographs of Abu Nidal's corpse to journalists, along with a medical report showing it said that he had died after a bullet entered his mouth and exited through his skull. Habbush said Iraqi authorities had come to Abu Nidal's house to arrest him on suspicion of colluding with foreign governments. After saying that he needed a change of clothes, he went into his bedroom and shot himself in the mouth, according to Habbush. He died eight hours later at the hospital.

In 2002 Jane's Information Group reported that Iraqi intelligence had found classified documents in her home about a US attack on Iraq. When they raided the house, fire broke out between Abu Nidal's men and Iraqi Intelligence. In the midst of this, Abu Nidal ran into his room and was killed; Palestinian sources told Jane that he had shot himself multiple times. Jane suggested that Saddam Hussein had killed him because he feared that Abu Nidal would act against him in the event of a US invasion.

In 2008 Robert Fisk obtained a report written in September 2002 by the "M4 Special Intelligence Unit" Iraqi for Saddam Hussein's office. The report said that the Iraqis had been interrogating Abu Nidal at his home as a suspected spy for Kuwait and Egypt, and indirectly for the United States; it was said that he had been asked, indirectly, by the Kuwaitis to find links between Iraq and al-Qaeda. Just before being transferred to a more secure location, Abu Nidal asked to be allowed to change his clothes, entered his bedroom and shot himself, the report said. According to the report, he was buried on August 29, 2002 at the al-Karakh Islamic cemetery in Baghdad, in a grave marked M7.