His name had been mentioned days earlier in the "confessions" of 10 men and a woman to a suicide bombing in Damascus which were broadcast on Syrian television.

Ittir is believed to have helped to arrange meetings between senior members of Fatah al- Islam following 15 weeks of bloody fighting between the group and the Lebanese army that left the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp destroyed and more than 400 people dead.

Information gathered in his interrogations apparently suggests that Abssi left the country some months after fleeing Nahr al-Bared.

Rather than attempting to leave Lebanon immediately, he traveled with thousands of displaced inhabitants of Nahr al-Bared to the nearby Beddawi camp, where he was taken in by a radical imam.

The Imam, called Sheikh Hamza Qassem, allowed Abssi to stay at his house, near the Quds mosque, for almost a month after he arrived in Beddawi. Security officials swooped on Qassem and two other Beddawi-based militants the day after Syrian confession tapes were shown on television, but the imam escaped in the confusion of an ensuing gun battle that left an innocent passer-by dead.

But Qassem's freedom was short lived.

Days later he surrendered to Palestinian security forces in the camp, and was transferred to Lebanese custody, where he underwent intensive questioning about his links to Islamist militants. He is reported to have admitted to providing shelter to Abssi when he arrived at Beddawi.

After almost a month at Qassem's house, the Fatah al-Islam leader is believed to have moved to a new hideout in the camp. Media reports claim that for several months Abssi's new bolt-hole was protected by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), a pro-Syrian Palestinian faction which operates on the notoriously porous border between Syria and Lebanon.

The PFLP-GC was mentioned in a United Nations Security Council meeting earlier this month that was held to discuss the problem of arms smuggling across the border, and Abssi must have known that his best chance of escaping the country was on the tried and tested smuggling routes between the two countries.

After several months in Beddawi, it appears he took his chance, traveling from the camp through the sparsely populated northern Bekaa valley toward the Syrian border.

According to media reports on Monday, Abssi crossed the border in a white Mitsubishi van, with the help of an unidentified Lebanese.

The man with the white van returned to Lebanon and had it not been for the testimony of Ittir, he might never have been caught. As it is, the man said to have driven Lebanon's most wanted fugitive out of the country is now adjusting to life in jail.

There has still been no official confirmation of his arrest, and senior government and security officials refused to comment on the matter yesterday, telling The Daily Star that the case was in the hands of the judiciary. -Daily Star