(CNSNews.com) - The U.S. government was aware from the outset of Yasser Arafat's hand in the 1973 murder of two American diplomats in Sudan, according to a formerly secret document released Monday by the State Department.
"The Khartoum operation was planned and carried out with the full knowledge and personal approval of Yasser Arafat," said an official U.S. intelligence memorandum dated June 1973. It added that representatives of Fatah, Arafat's faction of the PLO, "participated in the attack, using a Fatah vehicle to transport the terrorists to the Saudi Arabian Embassy."
The Saudi Embassy in Khartoum was where Palestinian terrorists murdered U.S. Ambassador Cleo Noel and U.S. charge d'affaires George Curtis Moore, along with a Belgian diplomat, Guy Eid, on March 2, 1973. The eight terrorists had seized the diplomats during an embassy function, demanding the release of jailed Palestinian terrorists, including Fatah's Abu Daoud, who planned the attack on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics the previous year and was in prison in Jordan; and Sirhan Sirhan, Senator Robert Kennedy's assassin, imprisoned in California. |