AFP - A top Palestinian official and three of his bodyguards were killed in a bomb attack on Tuesday at Mieh Mieh refugee camp near the city of Sidon in southern Lebanon, officials and the army said.
   
An army spokesman told AFP that the official, Kamal Medhat, was at the entrance of the camp in a two-vehicle convoy when a roadside bomb exploded killing him and three of his bodyguards.
   
"The bomb was apparently hidden in a little shed on the side of the road and was detonated as Medhat's convoy drove by," he said.
   
The force of the blast tore through the Mercedes in which Medhat was travelling and threw the car into a nearby field, witnesses said.
   
Munir Maqdah, in charge of security at Lebanon's 12 refugee camps, said Mehdat and several bodyguards died in the blast.
   
"Kamal Medhat was killed along with ... his bodyguards when a roadside bomb exploded as his vehicle drove by, near the entrance to the camp and an army checkpoint," Maqdah said.
   
Maqdah had earlier said that four bodyguards were killed.
   
Medhat, in his 50s, was the deputy representative of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in Lebanon.
   
He was also a former intelligence chief for the mainstream Fatah movement in Lebanon.
   
Tensions have been high at the Mieh Mieh camp where two people were killed at the weekend in an apparent settling of accounts between two rival clans.
   
Medhat had visited Mieh Mieh in a bid to calm the situation.
   
"He was on his way out of the camp where he had visited officials in a bid to ease the tension," Hisham El-Debsi, a PLO official, told AFP.
   
Mehat, also known as Kamal Naji, was a close aide to the late PLO chief Yasser Arafat when the latter was leading his guerilla war against Israel from Lebanon.
   
The representative of the Palestinian Hamas faction in Lebanon, Osama Hamdan, condemned the killing saying it was aimed at sowing discord in the Palestinian camps, considered breeding grounds for extremist groups.
   
The Lebanese army does not enter the camps, leaving responsibility for security to Palestinian factions.
   
The explosive situation in the camps was starkly brought to light in 2007 during deadly confrontations at the Nahr el-Bared camp in northern Lebanon between the army and Fatah al-Islam, an Al-Qaeda-inspired group.
   
The fighting killed 400 people dead, including 168 soldiers, and led to the Lebanese army entering a Palestinian camp for the first time since the country's 1975-1990 civil war.
   
According to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), there are between 350,000 and 400,000 Palestinian refugees in Lebanon -- a country of more than four million inhabitants -- most of them living in the 12 camps.
   
Other estimates put the number of refugees at 200,000 to 250,000 as UNRWA does not strike off its lists the names of those who emigrate.