Farouk al-Kaddoumi (alternative transliteration: Faruq al-Qaddumi; ; born 18 August 1931), also known by his kunya, Abu al-Lutf, was until 2009 Secretary-General and between 2004 and 2009 Chairman of Fatah's central committee and the Palestine Liberation Organization's political department, operating from Tunisia. Early life Farouk Kaddoumi was born on 18 August 1931 in the town of Jinsafut near Nablus and later his family moved to Jaffa in present-day Israel. During the 1948 Arab-Israeli War they fled to Nablus in the West Bank. For three years in the early 1950s he worked in Saudi Arabia for the Arab-American Petroleum Company (ARAMCO). In 1954 he moved to Egypt and while studying economy and political science at the American University in Cairo, he joined the Baath party. Career with Fatah In 1958, he joined Yasser Arafat and others in forming student groups calling for the liberation of Palestine. Finally, they formed Fatah (Palestinian National Liberation Movement) that was officially declared beginning of 1965. During the time, he was working for the ministry of health of Kuwait but in 1966 was expelled from the country for political activities connected with the PLO. By 1969 he became one of key figures in the PLO and after 1973 he headed its political department in Beirut, Lebanon. In 1976, Arafat and Kaddoumi met with Meir Vilner and Tawfik Toubi, heads of Rakah (New Communist List), which had developed after the 1965 split in the Israeli Communist Party, and from which Hadash eventually developed. This meeting led to a close cooperation. He has been living in Tunis since the early 1980s, where the PLO was based after it evacuated Lebanon. In 1985, he claimed that Leon Klinghoffer was pushed over the side of the Achille Lauro by his wife for the insurance money, when it was the four Palestine Liberation Front (PLF) hijackers of the Achille Lauro who singled out and murdered Klinghoffer, a Jew, after being refused permission by the Syrian government to dock at Tartus. At the beginning of the 1973, he served as the head of the PLO's political department. After the Oslo accords in 1993, which he opposed as a betrayal of the PLO's principles, he refused to move to the Palestinian territories with the rest of the leadership to set up the Palestinian National Authority (PNA). From exile, he continued to advocate a hardline stance towards Israel, refused cooperation with the PNA and