DAMASCUS, 13 November 2005 — Syria yesterday mourned the death of internationally renowned and Syrian-born Hollywood filmmaker Moustapha Al-Akkad who died in hospital from serious injuries sustained in last week’s hotel bomb blasts in the Jordanian capital Amman.
Senior officials, representatives of cultural and art groups and organizations, media people, and hundreds of Akkad’s fans received his body at the Syrian-Jordanian border yesterday.
The body was taken straight to the Damascus-based Al-Shami Private Hospital and it will be moved to Akkad’s home town Aleppo early in the morning today where he will be buried.
Offering his condolences to Akkad’s family yesterday, Syrian People’s Assembly (Parliament) Speaker Mahmoud Al-Abrash said that the masterpieces done by Syria’s greatest film director had crystallized national, Arab and human causes and values. “His death is a great loss to his country and the whole world,” Al-Abrash said.
Akkad, one of the few Arab filmmakers known in the West, had been staying in Grand Hayat hotel, one of three luxury hotels hit by suicide bombers in Amman on Wednesday, killing at least 56 people, including his 34-year-old daughter Rima, and wounding around 300 others.
For his part, Syrian Minister of Culture Dr. Mahmoud Al-Sayyed expressed his deep sorrow for the death of Akkad and said that he was the victim of terrorism, which is targeting all human civilization.
Minister of Information Dr. Mahdi Dhakhlallah said that the demise of Akkad in bomb blasts in Amman showed that terrorists do not differentiate between one and another when they decide to strike.
A day before Akkad’s death, President Bashar Assad directed Syria’s Ambassador to Jordan Ali Hammoud to visit the injured Syrian film director in the hospital in Amman and to express condolences for the death of his daughter Rima on behalf of the president and the Syrian people. Akkad’s sister, Leila, said the world was saddened by the tragic death of her brother and called for an end to terrorist attacks on civilians.
Akkad was executive producer of the Halloween horror films and directed a 1976 English-language movie, The Message, about the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) starring Anthony Quinn.
In his controversial epic about early Islam, Akkad faced the challenge of shooting a movie where viewers neither see nor hear the main character because of Islam’s ban on images of the Prophet. Quinn played the Prophet’s uncle Hamza.
Akkad, who spent the recent Eid Al-Fitr holiday with his relatives and friends in his home town Aleppo, was in Jordan to attend a wedding party. He was scheduled to go back to Syria where he was supposed to be honored by the Damascus International Theatre Festival.
Born in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo in July in 1930, Akkad also directed the 1981 film ‘Lion of the Desert’, in which Quinn starred as Libyan anti-colonial fighter Omar Mukhtar.
After finishing his secondary studies in Syria, Akkad left for America in 1950.
He was preparing to produce a new movie on famous leader Salahuddin, who liberated Jerusalem from the Crusaders.
The body of his daughter Rima Akkad Monla was flown to Lebanon and buried in Tripoli after Friday prayers in the city’s main mosque. Her husband, Ziad Monla and other relatives were joined at the funeral by former Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati.