A master bomb maker who once targeted commercial airliners and was suspected of aiding the Iraq insurgency has fled to Lebanon, an FBI official has confirmed.

There is information that 73-year-old Abu Ibrahim was reportedly in Tripoli, a city in northwestern Lebanon, the official said earlier this week. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation continues.

The Palestinian terrorist is accused of bombings in the 1980s. He was indicted in the 1982 bombing of Pan Am Flight 830. The explosion killed a 16-year-old boy and wounded more than a dozen passengers as the plane headed to Honolulu from Tokyo.

The FBI has been looking to catch Ibrahim for decades and has recently increased its efforts to arrest him. In April an FBI committee recommended Ibrahim be placed on the agency's list of most wanted terrorists.

The FBI is also trying to tap a State Department reward program to boost the bounty for his capture to millions of dollars. Ibrahim's real name is Husayn al-Umari.

Ibrahim has remained out of reach for decades while living in Baghdad. With the help of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, Ibrahim ran a feared terrorist organization called “;15 May,”; according to federal court documents and terrorism experts. The group is named for the date Israel was founded.

Ibrahim, a devout Sunni who was born in Tripoli, is suspected of carrying out more than two dozen attacks on mainly American, Israeli and Jewish targets in a career that spans decades.

The Iraqi government also used him to conduct terrorism operations against Syria and Iran. In his book, former CIA spymaster Duane Clarridge wrote that Ibrahim had a “;talent for constructing ingenious machines of death, such as refrigerator trucks whose cooling pipes were filled with liquid explosives.”;

He is accused of training a slew of operatives in the craft of bomb making whose expertise metastasized across the Middle East, including Mohammed Rashed and Abu Zyad. Rashed is behind bars at the Supermax maximum-security prison in Florence, Colo. He is scheduled to be released in less than four years. Some still remain unaccounted for, like Zyad.

The U.S. does not have an extradition treaty with Lebanon.