Seven Jewish men were remanded in custody by a Jerusalem magistrate this week as suspects in two separate terrorist acts against Arabs on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem.
Three of the suspects taken into custody today are linked to an attempted assault on the Temple Mount, site of two of the holiest shrines of the Islamic faith, which occurred in January and was foiled by Moslem guards who summoned police.
Four were arrested yesterday in connection with the ambush of an Arab bus near Ramallah last Sunday in which six of the 18 passengers were wounded by gunfire, one of them seriously.
NO EVIDENCE LINKING THE TWO INCIDENTS
So far there is no known evidence linking the two incidents. An organization calling itself “Terror Against Terror” (TNT) claimed responsibility for the bus ambush. The three men arrested in the Temple Mount incident were said by the media to be members of a small messianic sect occupying the abandoned Arab village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem.
Chief Magistrate Aharon Simcha banned disclosure of their identities according to the law which forbids the identification of suspects until they are formally arraigned.
The police reportedly are searching for a fourth man alleged by the media to have been the ringleader of the Temple Mount plot. According to Israel Radio, the three suspects were taken to the Temple Mount by police today and re-enacted, for police television cameras, their attempts to scale the wall and plant explosives intended to harm Moslem worshippers as they left the Al Aksa and Dome of the Rock mosques. Police said the men were “totally cooperative.”
FOUR SUSPECTS ARE AMERICAN OLIM
The four remanded in the bus ambush case were identified today by their lawyer, Mair Schechter, as Levi Hazan, Yehuda Richter, Craig Leitner and Meir Leibowitz. The lawyer confirmed an earlier statement by Rabbi Meir Kahane, leader of the anti-Arab Kach movement, that all were American olim living on the West Bank.
The media reported that the police are searching for a connection between them and the masked gunmen who attacked a Moslem college in Hebron last year, killing several students and wounding others. The four were said to be uncooperative.
The bus ambush was also conducted by masked gunmen who attacked the vehicle which was transporting Arab day laborers from the West Bank to their jobs in Israel early Sunday morning.
Two of the three men from Lifta were remanded for 15 days and the third for six days. Press photographs inside the house they occupied in the abandoned village showed rightwing political tracts and Jewish messianic slogans. The few neighbors living in the area described the men as quiet but odd.
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