Probe of March Ii Massacre Shows All but One of the Victims Were Killed by Terrorists; Police Take R

An investigation of police action in the March II terrorist massacre on the Haifa-Tel Aviv highway concluded that all but one of the victims aboard the hijacked bus were killed by the terrorists. The police accepted responsibility for the death at one hostage who was misidentified as a terrorist and shot by mistake. In one other case, the investigation was unable to determine who was responsible.

But the report of the police probe into its own conduct, submitted yesterday to the Knesset’s Interior Committee, flatly rejected charges by some of the survivors that the police fired indiscriminately when the bus was halted at a roadblock just north of Tel Aviv, killing terrorists and their victims alike.

The committee session was attended by Interior Minister Yosef Burg, Inspector General of Police Harm Tavori, Police Controller Shmuel Eitan and other senior officers. They said that “rumors” that many of the fatalities among the hostages were caused by police bullets were refuted by the results of the autopsies performed on the victims.

According to the police report, the terrorists had murdered II of the 33 victims while the bus was still racing south along the coast highway, before it was stopped. They booby-happed the bus with high explosives which were detonated by a hand grenade thrown by one of the terrorists 15 seconds before he left the bus, the report said.

One victim, Haviv Elkhaveh, was shot in the back as he left the bus holding a sheet of white paper as a sign of surrender. According to one survivor he was shot by a policeman. But the police accepted the account of his wife who said he was shot by a woman terrorist.

The report conceded that it was difficult to distinguish the hostages from the terrorists. Eitan said the police could not have reacted differently because they were convinced that the terrorists were not interested in bargaining but in killing as many Israelis as they could.