Israel is expected to ask the U.S. to extradite Craig Arthur Leitner, a 24-year-old American wanted here in connection with terrorist attacks on Arabs in the West Bank and Jerusalem.
Leitner was arrested in New York yesterday and arraigned before a magistrate in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, which ordered him held without bail pending an extradition hearing. The heavy-set, bespectacled law student was arrested by a U.S. marshal in his dormitory room on the White Plains, N.Y. campus of Pace University.
Leitner was arrested here in March, 1984, with three other Americans, all identified by Rabbi Meir Kahane as members of his extremist Kach Party. They were charged with the June, 1983 machinegun attack on a bus carrying Arab workers from the West Bank to jobs in Israel and other attacks on Arabs on July 21 and July 31 of that year. The bus attack took place outside Mazra A-Sharkiya village, near Ramallah. Six Arabs were wounded.
Three of the men were tried and sentenced. Leitner reportedly agreed to be a State witness. He was released on bail but fled the country.
U.S. Marshal Victor O’Boyski, who made the arrest assisted by an officer of the New York Police Department’s Fugitive Investigation Strike Team, was quoted as saying he began searching for Leitner last March after the Israeli government “asked us to do a discreet inquiry on whether or not he was in New York.” Leitner’s parents live in Queens, N.Y.
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