Abu Nidal

Sabri Khalil al-Banna was born in May 1937 in Jaffa, on the Mediterranean coast of what was then the British Mandate of Palestine.

His father, Hajj Khalil al-Banna, owned 6,000 acres (24 km2) of orange groves situated between Jaffa and Majdal, today Ashkelon in Israel.

The family lived in luxury in a three-storey stone house near the beach, later used as an Israeli military court.

Muhammad Khalil al-Banna, Abu Nidal's brother, told Yossi Melman:

"My father ... was the richest man in Palestine. He marketed about ten percent of all the citrus crops sent from Palestine to Europe - especially to England and Germany. He owned a summer house in Marseilles, France, and another house in İskenderun, then in Syria and afterwards Turkey, and a number of houses in Palestine itself. Most of the time we lived in Jaffa. Our house had about twenty rooms, and we children would go down to swim in the sea. We also had stables with Arabian horses, and one of our homes in Ashkelon even had a large swimming pool. I think we must have been the only family in Palestine with a private swimming pool."

Khalil al-Banna's wealth allowed him to take several wives.

According to Sabri in an interview with Der Spiegel, his father had 13 wives, 17 sons and eight daughters.

Melman writes that Sabri's mother was the eighth wife.

She had been one of the family's maids, a 16-year-old Alawite girl.

In 1944 or 1945, his father sent him to Collège des Frères de Jaffa, a French mission school, which he attended for one year.

When his father died in 1945, when Sabri was seven years old, the family turned his mother out of the house.

His brothers took him out of the mission school and enrolled him instead in a prestigious, private Muslim school in Jerusalem, now known as Umariya Elementary School, which he attended for about two years.

On 29 November 1947, the United Nations resolved to partition Palestine into an Arab and Jewish state.

Fighting broke out immediately, and the disruption of the citrus-fruit business hit the family's income.

In Jaffa there were food shortages, truck bombs and an Irgun militia mortar bombardment.

Melman writes that the al-Banna family had had good relations with the Jewish community.

Abu Nidal's brother told Melman that their father had been a friend of Avraham Shapira, a founder of the Jewish defense organization, Hashomer: "He would visit [Shapira] in his home in Petah Tikva, or Shapira riding his horse would visit our home in Jaffa. I also remember how we visited Dr. Weizmann [later first president of Israel] in his home in Rehovot."

But it was war, and the relationships did not help them.

Just before Israeli troops took Jaffa in April 1948, the family fled to their house near Majdal, but Israeli troops arrived there too, and the family fled again.

This time they went to the Bureij refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, then under Egyptian control.

Melman writes that the family spent nine months living in tents, depending on UNRWA for an allowance of oil, rice and potatoes.

The experience had later a powerful effect on Abu Nidal.

The al-Banna family's commercial experience, and the money they had managed to take with them, meant they could set themselves up in business again, Melman writes.

Their orange groves had gone, now part of the new state of Israel.

The family moved to Nablus in the West Bank, then under Jordanian control.

In 1955, Abu Nidal graduated from high school, joined the Arab nationalist Ba'ath party, and began a degree course in engineering at Cairo University, but he left after two years without a degree.

In 1960, he made his way to Saudi Arabia, where he set himself up as a painter and electrician, and worked as a casual laborer for Aramco.

His brother told Melman that Abu Nidal would return to Nablus from Saudi Arabia every year to visit his mother.

It was during one of those visits in 1962 that he met his wife, whose family had also fled from Jaffa.

At the height of its militancy in the 1970s and 1980s, the ANO was widely regarded as the most ruthless of the Palestinian groups.

Abu Nidal ("father of struggle") formed the ANO in October 1974 after a split from Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction within the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

Acting as a freelance contractor, Abu Nidal is believed to have ordered attacks in 20 countries, killing over 300 and injuring over 650.

The group's operations included the Rome and Vienna airport attacks on 27 December 1985, when gunmen opened fire on passengers in simultaneous shootings at El Al ticket counters, killing 20.

Patrick Seale, Abu Nidal's biographer, wrote of the shootings that their "random cruelty marked them as typical Abu Nidal operations".

Sabri Khalil al-Banna (صبري خليل البنا; May 1937 – 16 August 2002), known by his nom de guerre Abu Nidal, was the founder of Fatah: The Revolutionary Council (فتح المجلس الثوري), a militant Palestinian splinter group more commonly known as the Abu Nidal Organization (ANO).

Abu Nidal died after a shooting in his Baghdad apartment in August 2002.

Palestinian sources believed he was killed on the orders of Saddam Hussein, while Iraqi officials insisted he had committed suicide during an interrogation.

"He was the patriot turned psychopath", David Hirst wrote in The Guardian on the news of his death.

"He served only himself, only the warped personal drives that pushed him into hideous crime. He was the ultimate mercenary."

The family disapproved of the marriage, according to Patrick Seale, and as a result Sabri, Khalil's 12th child, was apparently looked down on by his older siblings, although in later life the relationships were repaired.