The murder of Dr. Joseph Wybran remains as much a mystery as it was when the 49-year-old leader of Belgium’s 30,000-member Jewish community was fatally shot on Oct. 3.
Belgian police promptly tagged the killing terrorist-motivated. But clues are few and claims of responsibility by Palestinian extremist groups in Beirut have been all but discounted.
The Belgian state security services are in close contact with Israel’s Mossad and with the French and Italian intelligence agencies, which have “antennas” in Beirut.
But the results are negative so far.
The Belgian weekly Le Vif-I’Express said European intelligence circles believe the slain Jewish leader was not an important enough target for commandos from Lebanon to have stalked him.
A Moslem extremist group calling itself the Soldiers of Righteousness took credit for the murder. The group is linked to the Palestinian arch-terrorist Abu Nidal.
But according to Le Vif-I’Express, the method of Wybran’s murder was unlike the work of professional killers trained by dissident factions of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Wybran was mortally wounded by a single bullet fired into his head at close quarters in the parking lot of Erasmus Hospital, where he headed the hematology and immunology departments.
The killer appeared to have been waiting for him when he left work at the hospital in the evening.
The news weekly pointed out that PLO-type assassins would have fired several times to make sure their victim was dead. Furthermore, it said, a professional would not have chosen the busy parking lot at 6:30 p.m., when people were constantly arriving to visit the sick.
It is believed that a professional killer would have waited outside Wybran’s door in an empty courtyard, Le Vif-I’Express wrote.
However, the killing was not improvised.
The bullet extracted from Wybran’s skull showed signs that the 7.65-caliber pistol from which it was fired had been cocked and uncocked several times before the fatal shot was fired.
That would indicate that the killer waited a long time for his victim to appear, the news magazine said.
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.
