The bloody and broken body of a Palestinian who had been on the run for a quarter of a century from a murder conviction in Israel was found on Friday morning in the garden of the Palestinian embassy in Sofia, Bulgaria.

Omar Nayef Zayed was discovered by his son and embassy staff at 7.30am local time. “He was still breathing when he was found,” the Palestinian ambassador, Ahmad al-Madbuh, told the Guardian. “We called for an ambulance and he died while the medics were trying to treat him.”

The ambassador said Zayed had been alone at the embassy and had been locked in for his own protection and there was no visible evidence on Friday morning of anyone having broken in to the three-storey villa. Asked what he thought had happened to Zayed, the ambassador said: “We are working with the Bulgarian authorities on an investigation which will reveal everything later.”



A police officer stands guard near the compound of the Palestinian embassy in Sofia on Friday. Photograph: Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP/Getty Images

Madbuh was quoted later on Friday as telling journalists in Sofia that the death was murder and said it was “a result of the continuing persecution by Israel”.

The Israeli foreign ministry declined to comment on Zayed’s death. Israel has a long history of carrying out the assassinations of Palestinian radicals it suspects of killing Israelis.

“Omar is one of the Palestinian fighters who led the struggle against the occupation and fulfilled his duty to his land and his people,” the ambassador said.

Zayed was one of three members of a Marxist group, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), convicted in 1986 over the murder of a 22-year-old yeshiva student, Eliyahu Amadi, who was stabbed to death in the old town of Jerusalem. Zayed’s brother Ahmed and a third PFLP member were also convicted over the killing.

In 1990 Zayed went on hunger strike and was transferred to hospital, from where he escaped. He appeared in Bulgaria four years later and settled there, marrying, having three children and running a grocery store.

Israel requested his extradition in December, prompting Bulgarian police to raid his home, but Zayed escaped again, taking refuge in the embassy in a leafy diplomatic district of the Bulgarian capital.

Zayed’s supporters claimed he had been made to feel unwelcome at the embassy, and had been warned that he could be in danger of Israeli assassination.



“Since the first day, the embassy was not happy and pushed him to leave,” said Mohammed Khatib, a member of Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network based in Brussels, who kept in contact with Zayed a few times a week. “They didn’t want him to meet us. They turned away lawyers we sent. The whole situation was complicated. The ambassador warned him that if he didn’t leave the embassy, something might happen to him.”

Khatib said he last talked to Zayed on Wednesday, and described him as being on edge.

“The last thing he said was there was something strange going on in the embassy. He was hearing things he could not explain. He was feeling it was becoming more and more dangerous for him,” Khatib said. He added that Zayed had telephoned his brother in Lebanon at 11pm on Thursday and so must have been killed between that time and 7.30am.

The PFLP claimed he had been killed by Israeli intelligence, saying it held “fully responsible for this nefarious crime the Zionist State and the Israeli Mossad who targeted Comrade Omar Nayef Zayed for assassination”. But the group added: “We hold responsible the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian embassy in Bulgaria who failed to protect him and his security.”

A protest in London in January against Bulgaria extraditing Omar Nayef Zayed to Israel. Photograph: Peter Marshall/Demotix/Corbis

Madbuh denied having put any pressure on Zayed to leave or telling him he was in danger. “He was protected by the embassy all the time. These are just rumours, rumours put out by the media,” he said through an interpreter.

The ambassador complained that his embassy had demanded security guarantees several times, but that Bulgaria’s foreign ministry had not acted. According to Madbuh, Bulgaria withdrew security guards from the embassy seven years ago on the grounds that there had been no attacks on the building for 20 years.

The PFLP has also had a long, fraught relationship with Fatah, the dominant party in the Palestinian Authority, which the hardline group has continually accused of appeasing Israel. Historically the PFLP looked abroad for allies, forging links with European militants such as the German Baader Meinhof organisation and Japan’s Red Army. It used aircraft hijacking as a primary means of drawing attention to its cause.

Bulgaria’s state prosecutor’s office appeared to put out conflicting signals over the course of Friday. It was initially quoted as saying police had been summoned to the embassy “about a man who died as a result of violence”. A spokeswoman was later quoted as saying no signs of violence were found on his body, but added that prosecutors were investigating whether Zayed was pushed or fell from a high floor of the embassy building.



The Palestinian fugitive died just hours after Bulgaria’s prime minister, Boyko Borisov, returned to Sofia from a visit to the Palestinian Territories and Israel. He told reporters on Friday that Zayed’s extradition had been brought up in meetings by both the Palestinian and Israeli authorities.

“I told both sides that Bulgaria respects the rule of law and will follow the legal procedures in the case,” Borisov said.

The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, dispatched a team of officials to take part in the investigation. “The president has condemned the crime in the strongest terms possible and has ordered the members of the [investigation] committee to travel immediately to Bulgaria to discover what happened,” the official Palestinian news agency, WAFA, reported.