Police have detained a member of the extremist Kach movement in connection with a grenade attack that killed one Arab and wounded 12 in the Old City of Jerusalem. They said they were questioning a Petach Tikvah man in his early 20s after an Israeli army-issue grenade was hurled into the Butchers Market, killing a 70-year-old shopkeeper, Atef Marzouk Abdul Rizk Dakidak.
Large reinforcements of police and border police were rushed to the city after rock-throwers Tuesday targeted Israeli-owned vehicles in the Old City. Several persons, including tourists, were reportedly hurt.
Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin condemned the attack and said those kind of assaults could not be tolerated whether they were committed by Arabs or Jews.
The suspect was described as a man with ultraright-wing views and a criminal record. Police said his arrest did not necessarily mean he was involved in the attack. They cautioned against premature conclusions on the identity of the perpetrators.
News agencies said they had received reports both prior to the attack and after it attributing responsibility to followers of Rabbi Meir Kahane, the Kach movement leader who was assassinated in New York two years ago.
A Labor Party Cabinet minister warned that the situation in eastern Jerusalem was dangerous. Housing Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said it was “very tense, on the threshold of blowing up.”
He said that pointing a finger at Jewish extremists before the conclusion of police investigations only added to the tension. He said, too, that it was still too early to judge whether a new Jewish underground was in the offing.
CORRECTION: A story in Tuesday’s JTA Daily Dispatch about the ADL anti-Semitism survey erroneously swapped two statistics. The seventh paragraph should read:
The moderately anti-Semitic, a 41 percent plurality of respondents, agreed with as few as two or as many as five of the statements, and those who agreed with none or one (39 percent) — are considered not anti-Semitic by ADL.
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