Founder of Islamic Jihad Reported Slain

JERUSALEM —  A man believed to be Fathi Shikaki, the founder and leader of the Islamic Jihad movement that has carried out a series of fatal attacks on Israelis, was shot to death in Malta last week, Israeli television reported Saturday.

Islamic Jihad sources in the Gaza Strip confirmed that Shikaki had been traveling from Libya to his home in Damascus, Syria, and stopped in Malta on Thursday. He never arrived in Damascus.

“If it is true, then the Mossad is to blame for the assassination,” said Sheik Nafez Azzam, an Islamic Jihad follower in Gaza. The Mossad is Israel’s spy agency, and it has assassinated Palestinian guerrilla leaders in the Middle East and Europe in the past. Islamic Jihad has blamed Mossad for the assassination of two of its leaders in Gaza.

Israeli security sources confirmed to Israeli reporters that Shikaki, 43, was targeted by Mossad. His organization has claimed responsibility for several suicide bombings that have killed 37 Israelis since the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel signed a peace accord in September, 1993. Islamic Jihad opposes the accord.

Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s office refused to comment on the reports of Shikaki’s death or whether Israel might be involved. But Rabin told reporters that he would not be unhappy if the reports were true.

“Shikaki was the head of a murderous terrorist organization which murdered many civilians,” Rabin said, adding that “no civilized society could bear” the existence of the Islamic Jihad leader.

The prime minister pointed out, however, that Shikaki also antagonized Palestinians with his support for Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi, who recently expelled thousands of Palestinians from Libya to underscore his opposition to the Israeli-Palestinian peace accord.

But Islamic Jihad members warned that they will retaliate if Shikaki was indeed killed by Israeli agents.

“Everyone will see the response of Islamic Jihad, and Israelis will pay the price,” warned an Islamic Jihad follower in Gaza who spoke on condition of anonymity.

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Islamic Jihad has refused to join the larger Muslim militant movement, Hamas, in negotiating with the Palestinian Authority on ending violent attacks against Israelis. PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat is said to be close to reaching an agreement with Hamas whereby the militant group will stop launching attacks on Israelis from Palestinian-controlled territory and will participate in upcoming Palestinian elections.

It is not clear what impact, if any, Shikaki’s death would have on the Hamas-PLO talks.

In the West Bank town of Nablus, Shikaki’s family was still trying to confirm his death Saturday night. Relatives were glued to the radio, tuning in Arabic newscasts from Damascus and Beirut.

“By the circumstantial evidence available, it could be Fathi, yes,” said Khalil Shikaki, his younger brother.

The younger Shikaki, a political scientist at An Najah National University in Nablus, said that his family telephoned Shikaki’s wife in Damascus on Saturday and that she confirmed he had failed to return last week from the trip to Libya.

Khalil Shikaki said his brother traveled on a Libyan passport under the name of Ibrahim Shawesh, the name Maltese officials said was on the passport of the man who was killed.

“But none of us has seen a photograph of the dead man, so we can’t be certain,” Khalil Shikaki said.

In Malta, police identified the dead man Friday as Ibrahim Shawesh and described the Thursday killing as “a professional job.”

Maltese newspapers and radio said he was shot in the head at point-blank range by a man in black in the seaside resort of Sliema hours after arriving in Malta.

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Shikaki’s death, if confirmed, would be a severe blow to Islamic Jihad, an organization the Egyptian-trained physician founded in Gaza in the early 1980s.

Unlike Hamas, Islamic Jihad has remained a small group of hard-core militants. It has never bothered with building the network of community health and education services in Gaza or the West Bank that has helped Hamas gain popularity. More recently, it has refused to entertain the notion of participating in Palestinian elections in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem.

Hamas has said it will form a political party and possibly field candidates in the elections for the Palestinian self-governing authority. But Islamic Jihad has rejected any notion of participation because it does not recognize the Israeli-Palestinian accord that forms the legal basis for the elections.

Shikaki built Islamic Jihad as a revolutionary movement dedicated to liberating land for the Palestinians by force, and it has never strayed from that commitment.

It was the first Palestinian faction to devote itself exclusively to carrying out a jihad, or holy war, on land that Palestinians claim as the necessary first step toward rejuvenating the Islamic world.

“We believe that the liberation of Palestine is the practical path on the way to Islamic renaissance,” Shikaki said in a September, 1994, interview.

Shikaki was born in 1951 in the Fara refugee camp near Nablus. In 1974, he entered medical school at Zagazig University in Egypt, a stronghold of Islamic militancy. It was there that he embraced radical Islam, his family has said.

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In 1980, Shikaki opened a private medical clinic in Gaza. He founded Islamic Jihad--originally called the Islamic Vanguard--in Gaza that year. The organization soon began attacking Israeli soldiers and civilians. In 1986, Shikaki was sentenced to four years in military jail for smuggling arms into Gaza. In April, 1988, Israel deported him to Lebanon. In 1990, he settled in Damascus.

Israel has repeatedly complained to the Syrians, through Secretary of State Warren Christopher, about allowing Shikaki to operate from Damascus. On Friday, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres publicly complained that Syria is allowing an array of Palestinian factions opposed to the peace process to operate from its territory.

One of Islamic Jihad’s most spectacular earlier operations was a hand-grenade attack in 1986 on an Israeli army brigade that was being sworn in at Jerusalem’s Western Wall, the holiest site for Judaism. One person was killed and several soldiers were injured in that attack.

In January, two Islamic Jihad followers detonated explosives strapped to their bodies as they stood at a collection point for soldiers at the Beit Lid junction in central Israel. They killed 21 soldiers and one civilian and temporarily halted negotiations between Israel and the PLO on expanding Palestinian self-rule in the West Bank. In April, Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing that killed eight people near an Israeli settlement in Gaza.