The young Acre-born terrorist who led last Tuesday’s attack on Nahariya in which a mother, two children and an Israeli soldier were killed was bitterly denounced by his own family in Acre. “I would have killed him with my own hands.” declared the 80-year-old father of Ahmed Abdel Rani who was identified by the “General Command of the Palestinian Revolution” in Beirut as the leader of the murderous assault in Nahariya. “He was always the black sheep of the family,” said his 53-year-old mother. A younger brother told reporters that Ahmed had once undergone psychiatric treatment.
Rani, who was 24 when he and two companions were finally gunned down in Nahariya, was born in Acre where he grew up with six brothers and sisters and amassed a long record of criminality and terrorist activities from the time he was 16. In 1969 he served one year of a two-year sentence for stealing a fishing boat and illegally sailing it to Lebanon. Before that, he was involved in planting explosives in Afuleh and concealing explosives in watermelons in the Haifa market. He was detained with two companions after an explosion on a Haifa bus but was released on the basis of an alibi that put him away from the scene of the crime. It was learned later that he had delivered the explosives to his colleagues who were given prison terms. Israeli authorities said that Rani escaped to Lebanon a second time and joined a terrorist cell which be had contacted on his first trip. His two companions in the Nahariya assault were from Tulkarem on the West Bank and from Egypt.
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