Real History, Explosions, and Israel

Posted Tuesday, May 14, 2002

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Tuesday, May 14, 2002

Jewish Settlers Confess to Bomb Plot, Says Lawyer

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Two Jewish settlers arrested on suspicion of trying to plant a bomb on the main street of a neighborhood in Arab East Jerusalem have confessed to the charge, their lawyer said Tuesday.

"Under interrogation they admitted their part in the incident during which they were caught," Naftali Wuerzberger told Israel's Channel Ten television.

Shlomo Dvir and Yarden Morag, both from a Jewish settlement near Hebron in the West Bank, were arrested in A-Tur on March 28 after they parked between the Palestinian neighborhood's Mukasad hospital and its girls' school. They tried to detach a trailer in which they had hidden a powerful bomb, police said.

Israeli television footage of the alleged device showed gas canisters and fuel barrels laid out on the floor of the trailer.

Four other settlers were later arrested for suspected complicity. Wuerzberger, who said he had been denied access to his clients until this week, denied the men constituted an organized "Jewish underground."

"This was an operation in the style of 'Hasamba'," he said, alluding to a series of Israeli adventure books for children. "Its intent was albeit grievous but in the end of the day it was a very amateurish business."

Israeli-Arab legislator Ahmed Tibi called the case "a dangerous development."

He accused police of not doing enough to catch the killers of eight Palestinians, who he said were shot by Jewish militants in the West Bank during a Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation over the last 19 months.

In another attack closer to A-Tur, seven teachers and a teacher were hurt when unknown assailants bombed an Arab school on the outskirts of Jerusalem on March 5.

Israel's deputy internal security minister, Gideon Ezra, said that if the alleged A-Tur bomb plot succeeded, it would have led to an escalation of Palestinian militant attacks which have already killed scores of Israelis during the revolt.

"These are a gang of murderers who wanted to set off their bomb close to a school," Ezra said on Channel One television. "That would have put all of the children of Israel at risk."