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Two weeks ago, Abu Hassan heard from the Christian Maronite leadership that the Israelis had assigned a new assassination squad to get him. A week before that he had protected a young Christian leader, Dany Chamoun, from a Palestinian mob, and the Christians were repaying the favor. Despite the warning, Abu Hassan is not known to have taken extra precautions. When TIME Correspondent Dean Brelis asked him a few months ago if he was worried about the Israelis' determination to kill him, he replied: "They're the ones who should be worried after all their mistakes. But I also know that when my number is up, it will be up. No one can stop it."
Palestinian investigators quickly traced the assassination to three mysterious —and missing—foreigners. TIME has learned that as many as 14 Israeli agents, some of them veterans of the Lillehammer debacle, were involved in the operation. The most curious of the known suspects was a woman later identified as traveling on a British passport issued in 1975 in the name of Erika Mary Chambers. Three months ago, she rented an apartment overlooking the Rue Verdun. She appeared to be an eccentric middle-aged spinster, known to her neighbors as Penelope, who loved stray cats and sketched street scenes from her window.
The second suspect was a nondescript, self-styled "technical consultant" with a clipped British accent who arrived from Geneva a fortnight ago. He used the name Peter Scriver and carried British passport number 260896. After checking into the Hotel Mediterrannee in west Beirut, he rented a Volkswagen from the Lenacar agency. At about the same time, a blond, friendly man who called himself Roland Kolberg and carried Canadian passport number DS 104277 checked into the Royal Gardens Hotel, also in west Beirut, and rented a gray Simca, also from Lenacar Kolberg said he was a sales representative tor Regent Sheffield, Ltd., a New York producer of cutlery and kitchenware. Nobody at the firm has ever heard of Kolberg; British officials say that no passport was ever issued in the name of Peter Scriver.
Some time on Jan. 17, the P L O believes, Penelope met with Scriver and Kolberg and told them what she had observed of Abu Hassan's movements on the Rue Verdun. After that, Scriver apparently drove his rented Volkswagen to a secret garage, equipped it with explosives and detonating devices, then slipped out of Lebanon, possibly on a Middle East Airlines flight to Athens Around 2:30 in the afternoon on Jan 22 someone parked the Volkswagen in the Rue Verdun about 100 yds. from Abu Hassan's apartment. Palestinian investigators speculate that Penelope had been watching the street from her apartment as Abu Hassan arrived an hour later, and that she used a radio device to detonate the bomb at the precise moment his station wagon passed the Volkswagen. In fact, TIME has learned the explosion was set off by a timing device that Israeli agents had planted on Abu Hassan's car.