Basel to Basil: a Kubaissi Link?

7 October 2010

Now this has just got to be a coincidence, or so I hope, as I'm putting it right out there on the Internet. But it's just so weird and sends a chill down my imaginative spine, that I felt I should share it with others.

Basel Bushnaq is hopefully just amused by now at the false mythology building up around his quiet suburban life. Since being named as former PFLP-GC terrorist fugitive "Abu Elias," aka Khaisar (Kaiser) Haddad, I've re-posted that charge, done a name analysis between the three, and some online commentary analysis. So far it seems possibly consistent to me, but still within the range of likely coincidence. I've certainly seen weirder.

Unfortunately, some of that is attached to this same case. For what I think will be a final bizarre installment in the Bushnaq line, I need to bring his wife into it, or her name anyway. The source I'll cite to start with is openly available at DC blockshopper.com. It's also the earliest reference I've found to Bushnaq himself. On 12 June, 2001, a Washington DC apartment (on M Street SW), owned by the couple Basel A Bushnaq and Raghad Kubaissi, was sold for $89,000. [source]

Basel's cohabitant in all later homes is listed is Raghad K. Bushnaq, suggesting they were married shortly after this sale. It's her maiden name that is the source of the coincidence in question. One site lists 31 people named Kubaisi (single s) living in the United States at some point, but only one Kubaissi – Raghad. [source] This would presumably be zero after the marriage, but for what it's worth, at least one other was here later - Sanad Kubaissi, a young Saudi-American guy, who starred in a US reality TV show about immigrants in 2007-2008. [source]

So her name as rendered is rare in the United States, but the small pool yields one prominent name from the past with a yankee link: Dr. Basil al-Kubaissi, a Palestinian terrorist organizer assassinated by Israeli spies in 1973. He was a US-educated Law professor, and was teaching at the American University in Beirut at the time. A 2005 book by two Israelis described him as “one of Black September’s most secret and ambitious leaders,” but appearing respectable and above suspicion. He specialized in failure, trying to kill Golda Meir twice in the 1960s. Earlier he failed to kill Iraq’s king Hussein in 1956. Afterward, Kubaissi would usually flee to New York. [Bar-Zohar, Michael and Eitan Haber. Masacre in Munich. 2005. pp 156-58. Google books]

Later, Al-Kubaissi joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and became “a trusted lieutenant of Gerorge Habash,” placed “in charge of the arsenal of the [Black September] organization in Europe” The "Mossad" assassins prowling Europe for plotters of the Munich Massacre stumbled upon Kubaissi by a fluke as he dropped into Paris. On the night of April 6 1973, after doing a deal with a local prostitute it's said, the professor was felled in the street by two men, with nine silenced shots. [source - see above]

It's nothing at the moment but curious that Mr. Bushnaq wound up with the approximate first name, and Raghad the last name, of this same prominent terrorist leader - until they married in America. Just by names it’s possible she is actually his daughter, and it can't be ruled out by age - Mrs. Bushnaq is just old enough to have been a baby daughter to Basil, somewhere between one and two years of age, at the time of his death.

As for the PFLP-GC mover Abu Elias in this possibility, this could be consistent if he wound up falling for an American girl named Kubaissi. The professor's daughter or not, he might well take the reminder of an earlier hero of the PFLP clan, and pick a variant of Basil for his new name.

Logical constructions aside, this would be too obvious a thing to do, like Keyser (Kaiser) Söze in The Usual Suspects stringing together "Quartet" and "Skokie, Illinois" in the same non-seqitur. In a movie, it works. In real life? Probably not. This apparent verbal hint must just be another slightly odd thing about Mr. Bushnaq, who probably is clean and a Bosnian from the Mostar Lakisic clan as he says.

Perhaps he was just singled out to be picked on for these random coincidences that could make him seem all sinister. Some things about "Lockerbie bomber" al Megrahi stood out as well, and that doesn't mean it was right to fake evidence and blame him. It wouldn't be right for that innocent man and his defense team to take it out like this on another unusual but innocent bystander, releasing his name to that jabberjaw Christine Grahame. But that must be what's going on here. I hope.

On the other hand, if their darker inklings and mine are even partly true, all I can say to those who are scrambling on the damage control is - please don't kill me. It's a little too open for that by now, isn't it? Just call this one a pan and give him another new life somewhere else. And like that - poof. He's gone.

But really, name games don't usually add up to much, do they?