BAGHDAD, Aug 21 (AFP) - International terrorist Abu Nidal committed suicide in Baghdad by shooting himself in the mouth as the authorities were about to take him in for interrogation, Iraq's secret services chief said Wednesday.

Palestinian Abu Nidal, whose real name was Sabri al-Banna, entered Iraq "illegally" in 1999 from Iran carrying a fake Yemeni passport, Taher Jalil Habbush told a press conference.

He said Abu Nidal, 65, shot himself when secret service agents turned up at his house to take him for interrogation after his presence in Iraq was discovered.

"He went into a room to change and a shot was fired. The group of agents discovered that he had shot himself in his mouth (with a Smith and Wesson pistol) and the bullet had exited the back of his skull.

"He died eight hours later at the hospital to which he was taken," Habbush said, without giving the date of his suicide.

According to Habbush, a "brotherly Arab country" had alerted Baghdad authorities to Abu Nidal's entry into Iraq.

"He was able to enter without being spotted thanks to the Yemeni passport (he was travelling on) because Yemeni workers do not need a visa to visit Iraq," he said in a rare public appearance by the secret service chief at the information ministry.

"We investigated for a very long time before discovering his place of residence where he was living under a different name from that on his passport."

Abu Nidal, who had enjoyed Iraq's patronage in the 1970s and 1980s, had been banned from Iraq in 1983 when Baghdad discovered his involvement in "activities harmful to the security of Iraq and Arab national security," Habbush said.

The militant rose to infamy in 1974 after he broke with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement and established the Fatah Revolutionary Council in Baghdad to pursue a harder line against Israel.

In its heyday, the group carried out assassinations and hijackings that made Abu Nidal's name synonymous with global terrorism.

Despite being a sworn enemy of Israel, many of his victims were Arabs, including moderate Palestinian figures who backed negotiations with Israeli left-wingers.

His major strikes included attacks on Rome and Vienna airports in December 1985, an attack on a synagogue in Istanbul in 1986 and the hijacking of a US airliner in Karachi the same year.

He was also suspected of assassinating the deputy chief of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), Abu Iyad, and one of the PLO's security chiefs, Abu Hul, in Tunis in 1991.

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