PLO Reverses Plan, Will Bury Wazir in Syria

The Palestine Liberation Organization announced Monday that it will bury its slain military commander Khalil Wazir in Syria, a surprise move apparently aimed at healing a six-year-old rift between PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat and Syrian President Hafez Assad.

The decision was announced as the Tunisian government blamed Israel for Wazir’s assassination here Saturday, claiming Israel had used an electronic warfare plane off Tunisia’s Mediterranean shores to disrupt telephone communications while an Israeli commando unit attacked Wazir’s home in the Tunis suburb of Sidi Bou Said.

Wazir, 52, two bodyguards and a Tunisian gardener were killed by the group of seven to nine commandos, who disappeared under the cover of darkness early Saturday.

The Tunisian government’s accusations Monday were made as unnamed, official sources in Israel acknowledged that the attack on Wazir’s home had been an Israeli operation involving the Mossad secret service, specially trained naval frogmen and an elite unit of the Israeli army.

Tunisian President Zine Abidine ben Ali issued a communique Monday evening “vigorously” protesting Israel’s violation of Tunisian territory in the raid and announced that Tunisia was taking the matter to the U.N. Security Council.

The Tunisian action came after a PLO reversal over where to bury Wazir, Arafat’s most trusted comrade-in-arms and a man who led all of the PLO’s military operations, including the coordination of the four-month-old Palestinian uprising in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza.

Only Sunday night, PLO spokesman Ahmed Abdel Rahman had said Wazir’s body would be flown to Jordan on Monday for burial today in the Jordan Valley in sight of the West Bank for which he had fought.

Political Reversal

But in a meeting before dawn Monday, the PLO leadership reversed itself “for political reasons” after receiving an invitation from Assad to bury Wazir in Syria, a country from which he, like Arafat, had been banned since 1983 because of their political differences with the Syrian president.

The move to bury Wazir in a country that had both jailed and banned him was seen as a major step toward patching up the deep split between the PLO and Syria.