which exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, on 21 December 1988; a former head of security for Libyan Arab Airlines was later convicted. Abu Nidal reportedly said of Lockerbie, according to Seale: "We do have some involvement in this matter, but if anyone so much as mentions it, I will kill him with my own hands!" Seale writes that the ANO appeared to have no connection to it; one of Abu Nidal's associates told him, "If an American soldier tripped in some corner of the globe, Abu Nidal would instantly claim it as his own work." Banking with BCCI In the late 1980s British intelligence learned that the ANO held accounts with the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) in London. BCCI was closed in July 1991 by banking regulators in six countries after evidence emerged of widespread fraud. Abu Nidal himself was said to have visited London using the name Shakar Farhan; a BCCI branch manager, who passed information about the ANO accounts to MI5, reportedly drove him around several stores in London without realizing who he was. Abu Nidal was using a company called SAS International Trading and Investments in Warsaw as cover for arms deals. The company's transactions included the purchase of riot guns, ostensibly for Syria, then when the British refused an export licence to Syria, for an African state; in fact, half the shipment went to the police in East Germany and half to Abu Nidal. Assassination of Abu Iyad On 14 January 1991 in Tunis, the night before US forces moved into Kuwait, the ANO assassinated Abu Iyad, head of PLO intelligence, along with Abu al-Hol, Fatah's chief of security, and Fakhri al-Umari, another Fatah aide; all three men were shot in Abu Iyad's home. The killer, Hamza Abu Zaid, confessed that an ANO operative had hired him. When he shot Abu Iyad, he reportedly shouted, "Let Atif Abu Bakr help you now!", a reference to the senior ANO member who had left the group in 1989, and whom Abu Nidal believed had been planted within the ANO by Abu Iyad as a spy. Abu Iyad had known that Abu Nidal nursed a hatred of him, in part because he had kept Abu Nidal out of the PLO. But the real reason for the hatred, Abu Iyad told Seale, was that he had protected Abu Nidal in his early years within the movement. Given his