Abu Abbas Dies In U.S. Jail In Iraq
(my comment: add him to the list of prisoners who've died in custody. I'll give long odds, nobody is ever named, arrested, or punished for killing him. Just like all the others. Increasingly, we use the same methods as our enemies.)
WASHINGTON, March 10 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – Mohammad Abu Abbas, the leader of the Palestinian Liberation Front (PLF) who was abducted by U.S. special forces in Iraq in April 2003, has died in a U.S. jail in Iraq, a Pentagon official announced late Tuesday, March 9.
The PLF, however, held the U.S. administration accountable for the “assassination of Abu Abbas, the Arab Palestinian national leader”.
“Initial reports indicate he died of natural causes,” Agence France-Presse (AFP) quoted as saying Bryan Whitman, the Pentagon spokesman.
“Medical efforts to revive him were unsuccessful and an autopsy will be performed.”
U.S. forces abducted 56-year-old Abu Abbas into custody in Iraq on April 14, following the ouster of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.
“Most people suspect it was a heart attack,” a defense official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
“It's likely the cause of death would have been cardiac failure given his medical history.”
A U.S. military official in Baghdad told reporters that Abbas was being “held somewhere in Baghdad” but then changed his statement to “somewhere in Iraq”.
It was not immediately known what would happen to his body or whether his next of kin have been notified.
Born in Syria to a Palestinian family, Abu Abbas was convicted in absentia by an Italian court over his involvement in the 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise liner, in which a wheelchair-bound American hostage was killed.
Abu Abbas has reportedly spent much of the past 17 years in Iraq.
He resettled in the Gaza Strip in the late 1990s, but with the start of the second Palestinian Intifada in late 2000, Abu Abbas returned once more to Baghdad.
The Palestinian Authority (PA) charges his capture by U.S. forces was illegal because under the 1995 Oslo autonomy accords with Israel, members of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), to which the PLF is affiliated, can not be arrested or tried for acts committed before September 1993.
The United States orchestrated, sponsored, witnessed and signed the accords.
Dozens of Palestinians demonstrated in April 2003 in front of the United Nations office in Gaza City to demand the release of Abu Abbas.
‘Assassinated’
The PLF, meanwhile, accused Wednesday, March 10, the U.S. military in Iraq of “assassinating” its leader in custody by refusing to give him medicine.
“We hold the U.S. administration responsible for the assassination of Abu Abbas, the Arab Palestinian national leader,” Nazem Youssef, PLF politburo member and representative in Lebanon, told AFP.
“They had stopped giving him medicines for 10 days at the detention center in Iraq, and he had been suffering from heart problems and blood pressure,” he charged.
Asked about the place of burial, Youssef said, “Details will be known after the meeting we have arranged for this morning with the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) in Lebanon.
“Abu Abbas will be buried in his homeland Palestine, but if as usual the Israelis make problems, the second choice is the Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmuk in Syria because he was born there,” he said.
Palestinian President Yasser Arafat paid homage to Abu Abbas, calling him a “martyr”.
Arafat and the Palestinian leadership reported the death of “the struggler martyr Abu Abbas, former member of the PLO central committee and PLF general secretary,” in a statement to the Palestinian official news agency WAFA.
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