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| 10/06/2008 A would-be suicide bomber who was shot dead last month outside a Palestinian refugee camp in south Lebanon was "probably" a Saudi national, a senior Palestinian official said on Monday.
The incident outside Ain al-Helweh "during which a man, probably of Saudi nationality, was killed has forced us to take strict and urgent security measures," said Sultan Abul Aynain, who heads the Fatah faction in Lebanon.
"After the death of the would-be suicide bomber, we arrested another young man of Saudi nationality who had entered the camp a few days earlier," Abul Anain added.
The bomber was wearing an explosive belt when he was killed by Lebanese soldiers in late May as he tried to blow himself up at a checkpoint outside Ain al-Helweh camp, near the southern port city of Sidon. The army identified the would-be bomber as a 28-year-old Palestinian called Mahmoud al-Ahmad Yassin. But a senior Palestine Liberation Organization official in Lebanon, Munir Maqdah, said the man was carrying false identity papers marked with the logo of the U.N. relief agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA).
Abul Aynain said "Fatah's military wing has formed a force of 500 armed men to monitor security in Ain al-Helweh."
"We have launched search operations to identify people in the camp who are foreign to it," Abul Aynain said.
"The Palestinian factions in Lebanon unanimously agree on the need to prevent people from outside the camp from residing in it, regardless of their nationality," he said.
"Ain al-Helweh will no longer be a place of refuge for foreigners," Abul Aynain said.
The failed suicide bombing came a year after the Lebanese army was locked in deadly battles in Nahr al-Bared refugee camp in northern Lebanon with the extremist militant group Fatah al-Islam thought to be mostly made up of foreign Arabs.
More than 400 people were killed, including 168 soldiers, in more than three months of fighting which ended in September.
(AFP) | 
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