DAMASCUS, Sept 26 (AFP) - A Hamas militant was killed when his car blew up in the Syrian capital Damascus on Sunday in what the hardline Palestinian movement said was an assassination by Israel's Mossad spy agency.
"We blame Mossad for putting a bomb in his car," Mushir al-Masri, a spokesman for Hamas, told AFP in Gaza City, identifying the victim as Ezzeddine Sobhi Sheikh Khalil.
Masri accused Israel of trying to broaden the conflict by targetting militant leaders outside the Palestinian territories and vowed that his movement would wreak bloody revenge.
Syrian police closed off the area around the explosion in the working class residential area of Al-Zahira, near the Yarmuq Palestinian refugee camp in the south of Damascus.
A burnt-out wreck was all that was left of the car, with blood on the driver's seat and the road surface.
A Hamas member at the scene, Talal Abu al-Moomen, blamed Israel and warned: "The response will come from inside Palestine, not from outside."
Israel has frequently threatened to strike Hamas militants at home and abroad, including Damascus, where a number of the movement's senior officials are based.
Israeli officials and the army said they had no informatoin about the strike, although a senior source close to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said: "It is obvious that Damascus is little more than a sanctuary for terrorists."
Syria's interior ministry said three passers-by had also been wounded in the blast.
"This ugly Zionist crime targetting leaders outside shows Israel is trying to export the crisis and to drag the whole region into the inferno," Masri said in Gaza.
"This will not stop our resistance but will lead us to carry out a painful revenge. Ezzedine al-Qassam (Brigades) will avenge the killing of Sheikh Khalil," he said, referring to Hamas' armed wing.
Ahmed Tibi, an Arab-Israeli MP in the Israeli parliament, slammed the strike, saying Israel was acting like "the mafia".
"Sharon has turned assassination into a strategy and peace into a doormat," he said in a statement. "The international community must stop the rampage of the Israeli government, which is acting like the mafia."
In Israel's last major strike against Hamas, 15 members of the military wing were killed on September 7 while they were undergoing training on a football field in Gaza.
The air strike was Israel's first major response to a double Hamas suicide bombing in the southern city of Beersheva the week before which left 16 Israelis dead, as well as the two bombers.
Israel then warned that its campaign against Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, would be extended to a pursuit of the movement's Syrian-based leadership as well as its foot soldiers.
Khaled Meshaal, the Damascus-based politburo chief who emerged as overall Hamas leaders after Israel assassinated two other top figures earlier this year, is thought to be top of the list of Israel's targets.
Israel claims that Hamas's strategic planning is now being almost totally conducted in Damascus, although a handful of autonomous cells still exist in the West Bank and Gaza.
Masri said Khalil, who was born in Gaza City, was among some 400 Palestinian militants deported by Israel to Lebanon in 1992.
On September 25, 1997, agents from Israel's Mossad secret service bungled an attempt to assassinate Meshaal in Amman by injecting him with poison.
However, five years ago Jordanian authorities deported Meshaal and four other Hamas leaders amid allegations of illegal activities.
Meshaal now divides his time between Syria, Lebanon and the Gulf countries, but has rarely been seen in Damascus since the Hamas offices were closed amid US pressure. He turned up in Cairo last week.
Washington slapped sanctions on Syria earlier this year, accusing it of backing Palestinian militant groups it regards as terrorist as well as well as seeking to develop weapons of mass destruction, all charges which the Syrian authorities deny.