PLO Attackers Ignore Request for Cease-Fire

Pleas for a cease-fire in southern Lebanon went unheeded Saturday as PLO forces moved against the remnants of troops loyal to terrorist Abu Nidal in clashes that have killed at least 46 people, police said.

Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat seeks to “liquidate Abu Nidal’s followers in south Lebanon,” said Arafat’s representative in Lebanon, Zeid Wehbe.

PLO units, shouting “surrender or die,” attacked Abu Nidal groups in a refugee camp and shelled some strongholds with mortars and rocket-propelled grenades at the rate of 20 shells a minute, a police spokesman said.

Hand-to-hand battles were waged in alleys in Sidon, a coastal city about 25 miles south of Beirut.

At least 163 people, including many civilians, have been wounded since the PLO began its offensive Friday to oust Abu Nidal’s Revolutionary Council of Fatah from southern Lebanon and gain control over the Sidon region.

Abu Nidal’s spokesman, Walid Khaled, said the group was “ready to accept a cease-fire.” Prime Minister Salim Hoss and leaders of Muslim factions also urged a halt to the fighting.

But Wehbe, in a statement read over Communist Voice of the People radio, accused the Revolutionary Council of Fatah of “working against the interests of the Palestinian cause and kidnaping Western citizens.”

Abu Nidal’s group is believed to be holding four Belgians captured aboard a yacht sailing off the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip in November, 1987. The Belgians are reportedly held in Libya, where Abu Nidal has his headquarters.

The fighting Saturday moved to areas outside Sidon, where PLO projectiles sparked many fires.

Pockets of Abu Nidal gunmen were holding out in several parts of the sprawling Ein el Hilwa shantytown, where an estimated 32,000 refugees live.

PLO officers with bullhorns called on the rivals to, “Surrender or die. There’s no way out. Surrender if you want to survive.”

The response was volleys of automatic weapons fire.

Abu Nidal, whose real name is Sabri Banna, broke away from the PLO in 1973 and was sentenced to death in absentia by a PLO tribunal for killing Arafat aides.

Abu Nidal is sought by the United States and some Western European nations for terrorist attacks over the last 15 years, including massacres at the Rome and Vienna airports in December, 1985, that killed a total of 20 people.

He also is wanted in connection with the hijacking of a Pan American World Airways jet in Karachi, Pakistan, in September, 1986. Twenty passengers were killed and 120 wounded.