Birth: NULL/NULL/1940 Death:NULL/NULL/1979
Born in Qula near Lydda in 1940; son of Hassan Salameh; was known as the “Red Prince”; attended secondary school in Birzeit; went to study Engineering first in Cairo, graduating in 1963, then in Germany; joined Fateh and was put in charge of the PLO’s Popular Organization Dept. in Kuwait in 1967; was Chairman of the Palestinian Students Union in Kuwait; joined to the Strategic Studies Institute in Cairo in 1967 to attend some courses; moved to Amman in July 1968 where he worked on the Revolutionary Security Apparatus becoming a member in the Fateh Revolutionary Council; after the Black September events in 1970, moved to Beirut where he was assigned to be in charge of the guerilla forces organizing operations against Israeli targets; was the PLO’s chief of intelligence and served as contact with the CIA from 1969; was a confidante of Plo Chairman Yasser Arafat, who made him commander of his personal elite squad Force 17; was charged by Israel with being chief of operations for the Black September organization, which was responsible, among others, for the 1972 attack on Israel’s team at the Munich Olympics; thus topped Israel’s ‘wanted-list’ (at one point Israeli agents killed a Moroccan waiter in Norway mistaking him for Salameh); also remembered for his wife, Georgina Rizak, a Lebanese Christian beauty queen who was crowned Miss Universe; was assassinated by Israel by a remote-control bomb on 22 Jan. 1979 in Beirut.
