A top Palestinian official and three other people were killed in a roadside bombing outside a restive refugee camp in southern Lebanon on Monday. Skip related content
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Kamal Medhat was the deputy representative of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) …More Enlarge photo
Senior Palestine Liberation Organisation official Kamal Medhat, two of his bodyguards and another Palestinian official were travelling in a convoy when the bomb exploded at the entrance of the Mieh Mieh camp near the coastal town of Sidon, an army spokesman told AFP.
"The bomb was apparently hidden in a little shed on the side of the road and was detonated as Medhat's convoy drove by," he said.
Medhat, who was a close aide to the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, is the highest ranking Palestinian official killed in Lebanon since the PLO was forced to pull out of the country in 1982 after the Israeli invasion.
Medhat, 58, was the PLO's deputy representative in Lebanon and also a former intelligence chief for the mainstream Fatah movement in the country.
Abbas Zaki, the Palestinian Authority's representative in Lebanon, blamed Israel for the killing and warned it would have serious repercussions in Lebanon and the Palestinian camps.
"Those behind the killing are working in one way or another for Israel," said Zaki, who had left the camp in another vehicle just minutes before the blast. "We are trying to calm the situation inside the camps."
Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, who is also the head of the PLO, "condemned this terrorist crime," according to a statement from his office. The militant group Hezbollah said the attack bore "the fingerprints of the Zionists and was aimed at sowing discord."
The bomb, made up of more than 20 kilos (44 pounds) of TNT, was detonated by remote control, Munir Maqdah, who is in charge of security at Lebanon's refugee camps, told AFP.
The other victims were identified as Akram Daher, who was in charge of the PLO's youth organisation in Lebanon, and bodyguards Khaled Daher and Mohammed Shehadeh.
Maqdah said three people in a second car were seriously wounded.
The force of the blast tore through Medhat's Mercedes and hurled it into a nearby olive grove, an AFP correspondent witnessed.
Tensions have been running high in Mieh Mieh where two people died at the weekend in an apparent settling of accounts between rival clans.
Medhat "was on his way out of the camp where he had visited officials in a bid to ease the tension," Hisham el-Debsi, a PLO official, told AFP.
Medhat, also known as Kamal Naji, was a close aide to Arafat when the PLO chief was leading his guerrilla war against Israel from Lebanon.
The representative of the Palestinian Islamist faction Hamas in Lebanon, Osama Hamdan, condemned the killing, saying it was aimed at creating discord in the Palestinian camps, considered breeding grounds for extremism.
Tension between Fatah and Islamist groups inside the camps has run high in the past year, with clashes and attacks leaving at least 12 dead.
The Lebanese army does not enter the camps, leaving responsibility for security to Palestinian factions.
The explosive situation was starkly brought to light in 2007 during fierce battles at the Nahr el-Bared camp in northern Lebanon between the army and Fatah al-Islam, an Al-Qaeda-inspired militia.
The fighting killed 400 people including 168 soldiers, and led to the army entering a Palestinian camp for the first time since the 1975-1990 civil war.
According to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), there are between 350,000 and 400,000 refugees in Lebanon -- a country of more than four million inhabitants -- most of them living in the 12 camps.
Other estimates put the number of refugees at 200,000 to 250,000 as UNRWA does not strike from its lists the names of those who emigrate.
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