27 February 2005	Sunday	17 Muharram 1426

DEIR AL-GHUSSUN, Feb 26: "Don't expect me home for dinner," Abdullah Badran told his mother, giving no other clue that he was about to blow himself up outside a Tel Aviv nightclub, killing four Israelis in the process.

Abdullah Badran, 22, left his modest family home in the village of Deir al Ghussina, in the northern West Bank, at daybreak on Friday. Less than 24 hours later, Israeli soldiers stormed into the house to announce to his mother Sudqiyeh that her son was dead

"He told me as he was leaving the house not to wait for him at dinner time as he was going to eat at a friend's house," a tearful Sudqiyeh said.

Clutching portrait of her son in her hands, the 54-year-old received a stream of condolence calls on Saturday morning from the women of the village.

Other members of the family, given shelter by neighbours, had left the house for fear that it would be destroyed by the Israeli army as punishment, even though the military recently announced that it was ending the practice.

Security sources and villagers said Mr Badran was a member of Islamic Jihad, although the leadership of the organization, like all the other militant groups, has denied involvement.

"I did not know that he would commit any attack and if I had known I would have told him not to do it," Sudqiyeh said.

"There was nothing abnormal about his behaviour and the news came to us as a complete surprise," she added.

Mr Badran had six brothers and three sisters, seven of whom lived in the family home with their parents.

Two brothers - Bilal, 30, and Mohammad, 23 - were arrested in the early hours of Saturday by the Israeli army.

Ezzedine Badran, a cousin of the bomber, said that Abdullah had been "close to Islamic Jihad" while adding that the Badran family as a whole were supporters of the mainstream Fatah movement of Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas.

"We are known as a family that supports Fatah, but Abdullah was close to Jihad," said the 42-year-old primary school teacher.-AFP