LEBANON - May 20 - Car Bomb Kills Son Of Palestinian Militant.

A car bomb in the Mazraa district of Beirut kills Jihad Jibril, the 38-year-old son of Ahmad Jibril, leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command (PFLP GC) - a militant Palestinian group based in Damascus and opposed to Arafat's peace negotiations with Israel. Plastic explosives under the seat of Jibril's Peugeot were detonated by remote control, killing him instantly as he left a parking lot in a busy shopping area, near the Palestinian camps of Shatilla and Sabra. No one else was hurt. (Jibril, who had two children, held a seat on the executive committee of the PFLP GC. According to some reports, he was also the group's head of military operations. The killing is the second car-bomb killing in Beirut in four months. In January, an explosion killed Elie Hobeika, the most notorious civil-war Christian militia leader. Hobeika had earlier said he would testify against Israeli PM Sharon in a court case in Belgium over the 1982 massacre by Israeli-allied Christian militiamen of 2,000 Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps during Israel's invasion of Lebanon). Jimaa Abdullah, for the PFLP, claimed that the "technology" of the bomb that killed Jihad Jibril showed that Israel was behind the killing. He said: "The Zionist enemy can stab you in the back at any time". But Yarden Vatikay, an aide to the Israeli defence minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, said Israel had "no connection" to the bomb. Ahmad Jibril at his office in Damascus said: "The Mossad managed to kill Jihad this time". (The PFLP GC - which separated some years ago from the PFLP, the group responsible for the May 19 suicide bombing in Netanya, Israel - has consistently rejected peace agreements with Israel, including the 1993 Oslo accords. Ahmad Jibril has been a close ally of Syria since the 1960s. Last month, the PFLP GC claimed responsibility for firing rockets from Lebanon into Israel and at Israeli occupation forces in the Golan Heights. Lebanese security forces subsequently arrested six members of the group).