Thaer Hussein Othman, a 28, was one of thousands of Arab volunteers who according to Iraqi officials are in Iraq to oppose the coalition forces.

Othman lived in Denmark with his wife and three-year-old son. When the war broke out on March 20 he immediately travelled to Iraq via Syria.

He did not die in combat but was seriously injured last week while on the road from the Syrian border to Baghdad, when fire from a US Apache helicopter hit the bus he was in.

Othman died of his wounds in a Baghdad hospital on Sunday, family members said.

Othman was born in the Palestinian refugee camp of Burj al-Barajneh in southern Beirut, and emigrated to Denmark in 1987, when he was 13. This was during the Lebanese civil war and a year that saw fierce battles in Beirut's refugee camps.

His relatives said he had no political affiliations, and frequently visited Lebanon because he missed it.

Some 5,000 people attended his funeral in Burj al-Barajneh Tuesday, where Othman and his wife have relatives, to a fusillade of assault rifle shots.

The first report of a Palestinian killed in hostilities in Iraq came on March 20, the day the war started. The man killed in a coalition missile strike was said to be a member of the Arab Liberation Front, a pro-Iraqi Palestinian faction, and was also a resident of a Lebanon refugee camp.

For his part, a senior Palestinian official in Lebanon told AFP that hundreds of Palestinian volunteers had left to Iraq "to fight on the sides of the Iraqi people against the American-British invaders."

"Hundreds of fighters from the popular army, created in 1997, have already been sent to Iraq through bordering countries," said Munir Maqdah, head of the armed wing of the mainstream Fatah faction in south Lebanon.

SPACE.WIRE