The investigation of the attempted sabotage of Arab-owned buses in East Jerusalem broadened over the weekend as security services arrested five more suspected members of a Jewish underground organization believed responsible for acts of violence against Arab civilians.
A news blackout still surrounds the operation which netted about 20 suspects a week ago, all of them still in custody and under interrogation. None has been indentified yet to the public. Six have been permitted to contact their lawyers but the rest remain incommunicado as as allowed by the law in the early stages of a criminal investigation.
Most of the suspects are said to be residents of the West Bank and Golan Heights and to include among them army officers trained in the of explosives. Security forces reportedly discovered an illegal cache of arms and explosive last Thursday in Kiryat Arba, the Gush Emunim stronghold adjacent to Hebron, and in the quarter of Hebron taken over some time ago by Jewish settlers from Kiryat Arba.
According to the reports, the search yielded a variety of arms, grenades and explosives, all of Israel army issue. The recoved weapons were said to have been issued to the settlers as part of the regional defense program and subsequently reported missing.
SETTLERS WON’T AID SABOTAGE SUSPECTS
The settlers, meanwhile, are apparently trying to distance themselves from the suspects. The Council of Jewish Settlements in Judaea, Samaria and Gaza decided over the weekend not to provide legal aid to anyone charged in the bus sabotage case.
That decision followed a week during which Gush Emunim spokesmen first denounced the arrests, then denounced the scope of the arrests but finally admitted that the settlers will have to do some “soul-searching” in response to mounting evidence of the existence of a Jewish terrorist underground based in the occupied territories.
Discovery of the group and of the bombs planted in the six Arab-owned buses, timed to explode during the rush hour on Friday, April 27, has been credited to an inside informant. According to press reports today, the informant was one of the alleged perpetrators of last year’s attack on the Islamic College in Hebron in which four Arab students were killed and more than a score wounded. The press reports claimed that the security services had in fact solved that crime two months ago but refrained from acting at the time because one of the perpetrators, turned informant, was willing to provide further information about the Jewish underground network and its activities. It was this informant, some press reports said, who alerted the authorities to the bus sabotage attempt.
None of this has been confirmed by any official sources. Nor was there any confirmation of reports that the investigation is seeking evidence to link the suspects with bomb attacks that maimed two West Bank Arab mayors in 1980, with the attempted sabotage of mosques in Hebron and with an alleged plan to attack the Arab university at Bir Zeit, north of Ramallah.
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