The acting head of PLO intelligence was shot to death early Monday in front of a Paris hotel, the organization said. PLO chairman Yasser Arafat blamed the Israeli government, a charge Israel called "ridiculous."
An anonymous phone caller, however, claimed responsibility for the militant anti-Arab Kach movement. The caller promised more assassinations would be carried out.Atef Bseiso, 44, was killed by seven shots from a gun equipped with a silencer, said Ahmed Abdel-Rahman, spokesman at the PLO's headquarters in Tunis, Tunisia.
Abdel-Rahman said Bseiso was getting out of a taxi with a friend in front of the Meridien Montparnasse, a Left Bank hotel, when the killing occurred shortly after midnight. The killer fled the scene.
French police did not immediately confirm the incident.
In Amman, Jordan, where he is recuperating from brain surgery, Arafat said he had warned PLO officials that "Mossad will follow every one of us, especially before the (Israeli) elections." Mossad is Israel's secret service.
Arafat said he had warned Bseiso in particular. "I told him you are going to Europe, so be careful. But the Mossad was waiting for him."
In Jerusalem, a spokesman for Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, Ehud Gol, said, "These allegations are totally and completely ridiculous, and they don't even deserve responding to."
A caller to The Associated Press office in Paris claimed the killing was conducted by the Kach International Movement, a group founded by Rabbi Meir Kahane, who was assassinated in New York in 1990.
"He (Bseiso) was in charge of the murder of Jews, and because of this we killed him," said the caller, who spoke heavily accented English in the telephone call that came hours after the killing was reported. "We're going to kill every PLO member that we think is dangerous for the Jewish nation."
The Kach movement, which split after Kahane's slaying, advocates expelling all Arabs from Israel.
Bseiso's assassination was the latest in a series that have depleted the upper ranks of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Three of Arafat's key lieutenants have been assassinated over the past four years, stripping the organization of its leading strategists and leaving the group with no strong candidate to replace the 62-year-old Arafat as PLO chairman if needed.
In a telephone interview, Abdel-Rahman said Israel's government carried out the assassination "to support the Shamir campaign" on the eve of elections, "to say, `Look, we are very strong, we are the ones who defend the Israeli people.'
"In fact, they killed an innocent man who was for peace," he said.