Mountains of files are devoted to his name inside the annals of the FBI, CIA, MI6 and Mossad.His group, the Fatah Revolutionary Council, has been held responsible by the American State Department for more that 100 attacks across the world, in which 280 people were killed. But at least one anonymous Palestinian official was quoted saying that the death was mysterious.So vicious was Abu Nidal's career as head of an extremist Palestinian splinter group, which broke with Yasser Arafat and his Fatah movement in 1973, that during the 1970s and 1980s few acts of butchery conducted in the name of Middle East politics passed by without his name appearing in the Western press as a leading suspect. Later in the day, Palestinian officials in the West Bank – men loathed by Abu Nidal for having dealings with Israel – said their sources in Iraq had indeed confirmed his death, although the exact circumstances remained unclear.The favoured theory was that the ageing killer had shot himself; it is believed he had leukaemia, and had moved to Iraq for treatment from Egypt several years ago. But reports were persistent enough yesterday to ensure that they made international headlines.The news was broken by the Palestinian newspaper Al-Ayyam, which said that Abu Nidal, the nom de guerre for 65-year-old Sabri al-Banna, died three days ago. Abu Nidal, the megalomaniac Palestinian renegade whose name became an international byword for the use of indiscriminate violence, has been found dead from shot wounds in his Baghdad apartment, according to Palestinian officials in the occupied territories. If true, it marks the end of a man whose notoriety once almost rivalled that of Osama bin Laden, a ruthless killer who led the West's most wanted list for years, and whose hands are soaked in the blood of many scores of people from some 20 countries.The evidence of his death, which has been reported in the past – once by Libya's Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in a Newsweek interview – is incomplete. In fact, it was totally empty – not unlike the group of ruthless and cruel gunmen who worked for him over more than a quarter of a century.His "suicide" might come as a gift to an American administration longing to connect Saddam Hussein to "world terror" As for his real death, I suspect it came long ago.. In Lebanon, suspected collaborators were buried alive, fed juice through a tube into their mouths and then, when word came from Libya that they should be executed, a bullet would be fired down the tube.Abu Nidal spent part of his youth in Nablus in the Israeli-occupied West Bank but, presumably, we shall never know what he thought of the collapse of the Oslo "peace" – an event he would profoundly have wished to see.At his movement's office in Beirut yesterday, there was not a black flag or a wreath to be seen.

He drank – or drinks, for let us not be sure he is really dead yet – copious amounts of whiskey but disdains other vices, save murder, that is.His Fatah Revolutionary Council regularly suffered internal revolutions that left its own members in their graves. He was a gun to hire, a man who ordered the killing of Jews in an Istanbul synagogue, of moderate Palestinians close to Mr Arafat (including Abu Iyad), of passengers at Rome and Vienna airports, the man who tried to kill the Israeli ambassador to London in 1982, the event that gave Israel the excuse to invade Lebanon with the claim – totally untrue – that Mr Arafat had ordered the murder.He had staged attacks in 20 countries over more than three decades, had visited eastern Europe during the Warsaw Pact years, had even arranged the murder of one of the Palestinians' first envoys to Britain. Just as Osama bin Laden now has kidney failure ...The fictional death should not obscure the fact that Abu Nidal is/was/used to be one of the nastiest criminals of the Middle East. Saddam Hussein's demise was predicted in 1980, 1986, 1988, 1990, 1991, 2001 and 2002 And yes, President Saddam often had cancer too. Yasser Arafat's political death has been declared in 1978, 1982, 1983, 1990, 2001 and 2002. We warned of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's imminent demise – from cancer, of course – even before we first announced Abu Nidal's death. The Times sent Ayatollah Khomeini on his way five years before his death.

Abu Nidal was the beast before the beast before Osama bin Laden.Remember him? He was the face on the Newsweek magazine report that Colonel Oliver North flourished before the American inquiry into the Iran-Contra scandal.We have a habit of dispatching our most hated enemies before their deaths. Patrick Seale, the only writer to attempt a serious biography, claimed he also worked for Mossad, Israel's equally incompetent intelligence service. He worked for the Iraqi secret service and the Libyan secret service and, briefly it seems, for the Syrian secret service. Now it's by his own hand, of gunshot wounds in Baghdad. All things to all men, I suppose it's inevitable that he would have to die in every way.

Sabri al-Banna, among the most vicious criminals of the Middle East, seems to go on being reincarnated for the benefit of dying all over again. He has died again This time, Abu Nidal has killed himself Ten years ago, he died of cancer Before that, he was shot to death in Libya. Al-Udeid served as a base in the Afghan campaign and has runways long enough for any aircraft.* Iraq's parliament unanimously endorsed the nomination of President Saddam Hussein for another seven-year term yesterday.. Qatar has long been cited as an alternative to the US facility at Prince Sultan base in Saudi Arabia for a regional command-and-control centre for any campaign against Iraq. Significantly, as if anticipating a refusal from Saudi Arabia to allow its bases to be used in an attack, the Pentagon is expanding its Al-Udeid air base in Qatar, where 3,300 US military personnel are stationed. Brent Scowcroft, National Security Adviser to presidents Ford and George Bush Snr, and the former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and Lawrence Eagleburger are far more wary than Vice-President Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, and the National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice.Mr Bush also faces opposition from almost all of the Arab world over an attack. Despite White House denials, the session is expected to focus on Iraq – and reservations about any attack being voiced by senior Republican figures.