The Israeli Embassy flatly denied today an allegation by the local office of the Palestine Liberation Organization that the Israeli secret service was involved in the murder of the PLO’s representative in Brussels, Naim Khader, this morning. Khader, 41, was shot five times by a lone gunman as he was walking from his home to his office.
The Embassy, retorting to the PLO charge, suggested that Khader was the target of a rival Palestinian organization. “We know that the different Palestinian movements kill each other,” an Embassy statement said. It noted that two Jordanians of Palestinian origin were recently tried and convicted by a Paris court for the murder of a PLO official, Ezzedine Kallak, in August, 1978.
Khader, who has headed the PLO office here since it was established in 1976, was the seventh PLO representative killed in the past 10 months. Three were slain in Paris, one in Nicosia, Cyprus and one in Kuwait. Belgian sources saia Khader was known as a “moderate” and had been one of the first to condemn last year’s terrorist attack on a group of Jewish children boarding a bus for a summer camp in Antwerp. He had also denounced the bombing of the Rue Copernic synagogue in Paris last October.
Meanwhile, the French Foreign Ministry issued a Communique condemning Khader’s murder and expressed Foreign Minister Claude Cheysson’s “deep personal grief.” Cheysson, a European Economic Community (EEC) commissioner before becoming Foreign Minister, had been on close personal terms with Khader.
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