ON an early September morning in 1974, a bomb tore apart a TWA Boeing 707 flying near the Greek island of Corfu. All 88 people aboard perished.Almost exactly 27 years later — Sept. 11, 2001 — the world gaped in disbelief at a new and mind boggling spectacle waged by a new and elusive brethren of terrorists.The two events are separated by a generation, bookends of terrorism’s ever more bloody evolution.The mastermind of that first attack, Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal, 65, was reported dead Monday, after a murderous career that claimed hundreds of lives. Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz said he committed suicide.

　　Abu Nidal, once the premier mastermind of Palestinian terrorism, knew no bounds in more than two decades of assassinations, hijackings, bombings and blackmail. He attacked Jews, Arabs and Westerners alike, eliminating some of the closest associates of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.From the early 1970s until the early 1990s, in the days before Osama bin Laden became the household name for devastating attacks, this renegade Palestinian struck from Brussels to Bombay. He was long a shadowy figure — a master of disguise, rarely photographed, said to have undergone plastic surgery and probably racked by cancer. Monday’s news of his reported death in Iraq at the age of 65 was equally blurred. Palestinian officials in the West Bank said Abu Nidal’s body was found with several bullet wounds three days ago in his home in Baghdad but offered few other details concerning his death.Iraqi intelligence said Wednesday that the once the world’s most feared terrorist ended his life for the fear to face an Iraqi court for allegedly communicating with a foreign country. But in Beirut, Abu Nidal’s organization, the radical Fatah-Revolutionary Council, said its leader was assassinated by one of Iraq’s intelligence agencies.

　　Abu Nidal was widely believed to have been living in Baghdad since sometime in 1999, although the Iraqi Government never acknowledged this. It was a full-circle odyssey, after years of skipping from country to country for protection or to carry out his gun-for-hire enterprises. After falling out with Arafat in the mid-1970s, Abu Nidal set up shop in Iraq. Around 1983, he was sent packing as President Saddam Hussein cozied up to the United States. He moved to Iraq’s archenemy, Syria, remaining until 1986 when the West pressured then-President Hafez Assad to eject terrorists. Abu Nidal then went to Libya. In August 1998, according to reports at the time, he was in Egypt — under arrest or receiving medical care or both. He was said to have moved on, winding up back in Iraq. Along the way, Abu Nidal’s men attacked American jetliners, shot up synagogues, blackmailed Arab nations with the threat of attacks and mowed down Arafat loyalists who made behind-the-scenes peace feelers to Israelis. Among the most notorious attacks were the twin assaults on the Israeli airline El Al’s ticket counters at Rome and Vienna airports on Dec. 27, 1985. Eighteen people were killed and 120 wounded. His most famous victim was Arafat’s longtime friend and Palestine Liberation Organization deputy leader, Salah Khalaf, known as Abu Iyad. Khalaf was gunned down in his apartment in Tunis in January 1991, along with PLO security chief Hayel Abdel Hamid, code-named Abu Hol. Another front-page attack was the attempted assassination of Israel’s ambassador to Britain, Shlomo Argov, in June 1982. The shooting was Israel’s stated pretext for invading Lebanon four days later and laying siege to Beirut for three months until Arafat and his fighters were forced out of the country.

　　Abu Nidal was born Sabri al-Banna in May 1937, the son of a wealthy merchant in Jaffa, just south of Tel Aviv in what was then British-governed Palestine. The family had an 18-room mansion and 6,000 acres of orchards and orange groves. When the Arab-Israeli war broke out in 1948 and ended with the creation Israel, the Bannas joined the mass flight of Palestinians to nearby Jordan. The Bannas spent nearly a year in a refugee camp — dumped from great wealth to abject poverty, an experience that branded him with a bitterness that would remain with him for life. He wanted nothing less than the obliteration of Israel, with all its land restored to the Palestinians. Anyone willing to settle for less, as Arafat eventually did, was his enemy. He studied engineering in Cairo, didn’t graduate and wound up a schoolteacher. His first-born son was named Nidal, the Arabic word for “struggle,” and following Arab tradition, al-Banna took the name Abu Nidal, or “Father of Nidal.” After the Arabs’ defeat in the 1967 Mideast War, he joined the PLO and quickly became a close Arafat ally. But he soon accused Arafat of growing soft and split with him in 1974. A year later the PLO sentenced him to death in absentation, triggering an internecine war that led to shootouts in London, Paris, Beirut, Istanbul and Karachi. Abu Nidal’s men assassinated British diplomats in Athens and Bombay and Arafat envoys in Brussels, Rome and Lisbon. Among his first terrorist attacks was the bombing of a Pan Am jetliner at Rome Airport in December 1973, killing 32 passengers. The 1974 bombing of a TWA jet over the Aegean Sea killed all 88 people aboard. Security officials in Jordan, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Monday Abu Nidal had suffered from serious heart problems since the mid-1980s and, later, from cancer. They said he underwent open-heart surgery three times — once in the United States, where they said he traveled on a forged passport bearing the name of a Saudi prince. After the 1991 Gulf War — which left his chief financier, Iraq, defeated and impoverished — his spectacular operations virtually ceased. His last serious attack was thought to be the assassination of a Jordanian diplomat in Beirut in 1994, the year Jordan signed its peace treaty with Israel.

　　For many, the reports of Abu Nidal’s demise carried an added epitaph: the symbolic passing of the commando-style terrorism that emerged in the Middle East and was ruthlessly waged for decades by Abu Nidal’s Fatah-Revolutionary Council. In its place has come a menace with greater potential to cause mayhem and foil traditional counter measures led by the al-Qaida movement founded by Osama bin Laden.