Close Aide to Palestinian Terrorist Abu Nidal Slain : Lebanon: Assassination is second within Nidal’s faction in a week.

Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal’s top aide in Lebanon was slain Thursday in a Beirut refugee camp, police said.

The aide, known by the nom de guerre Walid Khaled, was the second activist of Abu Nidal’s Revolutionary Council of Fatah faction to be assassinated in Lebanon within a week. The group said in a statement that Khaled’s real name was Rizk Saeed Abdul-Majid Ousdeh.

Police said Khaled, 42, was driving into the Mar Elias refugee camp in his dark-blue Mercedes-Benz on Thursday morning when he was attacked by assailants in a white station wagon armed with silencer-equipped submachine-guns.

“Death was instantaneous,” said a police spokesman, who cannot be identified under standing government regulations.

Three people were believed to be in the car. They escaped through an alley, discarding their silencers, the spokesman said.

No group claimed responsibility for the killing. But the Revolutionary Council of Fatah is riven with internal feuds, and the assassins could belong to a rival faction within the group.

Khalil Abul-Hana, 52, a member of the group’s military wing, was slain in the Bekaa Valley town of Taalabaya on July 16. The identity of the killer is unknown.

In a communique, the Fatah guerrilla group accused Israel’s Mossad secret service and Palestine Liberation Organization chief Yasser Arafat of the slayings.

“This crime, the second committed by Mossad agents against our strugglers in less than a month, confirms that the traitor sitting at the PLO helm is paying for his political survival by collaborating with the Zionist Mossad in liquidating the leaders who personify the will of armed struggle in the Palestinian movement,” the communique said.

Khaled, a member of Fatah’s ruling council, became the group’s official spokesman in Lebanon in 1989.

He had joined Arafat’s Fatah faction of the PLO in 1968, five years before Abu Nidal split with the group. He was rumored to have been involved in the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972.

Abu Nidal’s Fatah Revolutionary Council is blamed for some of the most violent terrorist acts.