STEPPING DOWN. LEIGHTON SMITH, 56, U.S. Admiral; as chief of the Peace Implementation Force in Bosnia; in Naples. The retiring commander of NATO's Southern European forces oversaw the 1995 bombing of Bosnian Serb targets, which helped bring the 43-month Balkan war to a close. During his eight months heading IFOR, Smith won praise for separating the forces of the Bosnian Serbs and the Muslim-Croat alliance and bringing residual strife to an end, but he drew criticism for failing to arrest Bosnian Serb leaders charged with war crimes.

DEFECTED. NIZAR AL-QASEER, in his 60s, Iraqi engineer and former Irrigation Minister who led construction of a secret "supergun" for President Saddam Hussein; into Kurd-controlled northern Iraq. Iraqi dissidents in Jordan said al-Qaseer and his family were en route to Germany, where the presidential adviser is seeking asylum. The project to build for Iraq the world's largest cannon, which would have required 10 tons of explosives to fire a single round, was abandoned in 1990 after the invasion of Kuwait.

DIED. MAHMOUD JEMAYEL, 25, member of the Fatah Hawks militia and the seventh political prisoner to die since 1994 in the custody of the Palestinian Authority; from injuries apparently inflicted during torture; in Jerusalem. Jemayel had been held without charge since December after the Fatah Hawks, a splinter group of Yasser Arafat's faction in the Palestine Liberation Organization, terrorized the citizens of Nablus when that West Bank city achieved self-rule. In an inquiry ordered by Arafat, a court sentenced three officers in a navy unit convicted of abusing Jemayel to 10 years in prison and the others to 15.

ASSASSINATED. PIERRE CLAVERIE, 58, French Roman Catholic Bishop of Oran, Algeria; by a car bomb while returning from a ceremony in Medea at which he had honored seven French monks slain by Islamic extremists last May. Born in Algeria, Claverie supported the struggle there for independence from France. The blast that killed Claverie and his chauffeur may have been in retaliation for the visit of French Foreign Minister Herve de Charette, who also attended the monks' memorial service. That visit was seen by militants as further evidence of French support for the government they want to overthrow in order to establish an Islamic state.

DIED. MICHEL DEBRE, 84, fervently nationalistic French statesman who helped draft his country's current constitution, and then as Prime Minister in 1959-62 proceeded to use its enhanced executive powers; in Montlouis-sur-Loire, France. Described as "more Gaullist than De Gaulle," Debre earned his credentials the hard way: captured by the Nazis, he escaped in 1941 and joined the French Resistance. Debre was Premier in Charles de Gaulle's first government under the new Fifth Republic. Debre's patriotism never lost its hawkish bent. He opposed granting Algeria independence and advocated French nuclear testing. In later years he was unofficial keeper of the Gaullist flame.