Palestine-Lebanon roads were closed to traffic today after two Lebanese gendarmes had been shot dead when they attempted to halt a gun-runners’ automobile carrying arms to Palestine. The clash occurred between Sidon and Tyre. The smugglers escaped.
Meanwhile, 400 troops and police captured four heavily-armed Arab band leaders after a search near Shaffreh village in the vicinity of the northern Palestinian town of Acre. They will be tried by the Haifa military court, empowered to mete out the death sentence.
The “tip” which led to the arrests was given by Abu Alek, one of the 14 bandits arrested in the weekend battle near Jenin. Alek previously admitted being one of the bandits who murdered Abraham Goldschlager, Jewish guide of the Juarrah settlement, on Feb. 28.
With the Jenin area cleaned up by troops, roads were opened in the district for the first time in a fortnight, but continuing tension kept army detachments standing by as 26 of the Arab band’s casualties were buried, including Sheikh Attieh Achmed, notorious terrorist. The Jenin authorities were summoned today before the Northern District Commissioner to receive orders on combatting Arab bands.
U.S. CITIZEN TRIED FOR ROLE IN BOMBING
George Katimy, 37-year-old Christian Arab naturalized as an American citizen, went on trial for his life today before the Jerusalem Military court — the first foreign citizen to be tried in one of the four-month-old army tribunals.
Katimy, a graduate of Teachers College, Columbia University, who returned to Palestine last October to marry his childhood sweetheart, is charged with complicity in the bombing of a Jewish workers’ cafeteria in Jerusalem Jan. 16 in which a Jewish passer-by was injured.
The case aroused great interest in the American colony here. United States Consul General George H. Wadsworth provided Katimy with an attorney, the American-educated Moghannem Effendi Moghannem, and attended the trial’s opening in the defendant’s interests. The defendant’s 19-year-old bride waited in an anteroom.
Plso on trial is Addieh Haddad, an Arab carpenter, who is held to have thrown the bomb and then to have jumped into Katimy’s Plymouth sedan, which still carried New York license plates. Both were arrested on the spot.
A Jewish witness, Shlomo Haber, testified he saw an arm fling something from Katimy’s car, gave chase and heard an explosion. A Jewish policeman, Max Balhom, said he saw an arm throw something from the car window. Eleven more prosecution witnesses will be heard tomorrow.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
