Zubair Mohsen, head of the pro-Syrian Saiqa organization and believed to be the number two man in the Palestine Liberation Organization, was shot and seriously wounded early this morning. Two gunmen shot him in the head as he was about to enter his apartment in Cannes in the south of France. Doctors at the Saint Roch Hospital in Nice where Mohsen was rushed, say his condition is “very critical” but they are still fighting to keep him alive. Mohsen, 43, was said to be in a deep coma, barely breathing.
Mohsen, who returned to France two days ago from the Organization of African Unity summit in Monrovia, Liberia, was shot at 1 a.m. as he rang the bell of his fourth-floor apartment. His wife, Alia, 25, found him lying in a pool of blood. He had apparently been felled by one shot.
The PLO-bureau in Paris issued a communique blaming Israel “or its agents” for the attack. French police believe, however, the gunmen might belong to a rival Palestinian organization who shot Mohsen in reprisal for the recent attack against the Egyptian Embassy in Ankara, Turkey. The attack was carried out by “The Eagles of the Revolution,” an organization which is part of Saiqa.
The attack occurred while Mohsen’s colleague in the PLO, Faruk Kaddoumi, is in Paris reportedly negotiating for an official invitation to PLO chief Yasir Arafat to visit France. Mohsen was the PLO “war minister” while Kaddoumi acts as “the minister for foreign affairs.”
Mohsen had the reputation of belonging within the PLO to the most militant group and Israeli counter-terrorist experts believed he was personally responsible for most of the terrorist attacks carried out by the Palestinian organizations. Mohsen is the sixth Palestinian to be shot in France. The other five were all killed on the spot. The last, Ezzedine Kallok, PLO representative in France, was shot to death last August by pro-Iraqi terrorists. In January PLO leader Yasir Arafat’s top personal security aide, Abu Hassan, was killed when a radio-controlled bomb blew up his car. In June, Abdel Wasti, an Iraqi who was deputy editor of the PLO newspaper Falsttin Al-Thawra, was shot and killed in Beirut.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
