By Nadav Shragai Three members of the so-called Bat Ayin Jewish terror cell were convicted yesterday of attempted murder for trying to set off a bomb near a girls school in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of A-Tur last year. The Jerusalem District Court also convicted the three - Yarden Morag, Shlomo Zeliger Dvir and Ofer Gamliel, all residents of the West Bank settlement of Bat Ayin - of illegal weapons possession. In their verdict, judges Moshe Ravid, Yaffa Hecht and Jacob Zaban wrote that the three "decided to commit a major terror attack that would cause many casualties among the Arab residents of East Jerusalem by means of a booby-trapped cart that they prepared and left in a crowded place, at the entrance to a girls school and to Mokassad Hospital in East Jerusalem." During their interrogations, the verdict continued, the three "made many detailed statements that included confessions of having committed the crimes attributed to them. We have no doubt that the confessions of Yarden Morag and Shlomo Dvir are truthful." Morag and Dvir were caught by a policeman on patrol while they were leaving the cart, on April 29, 2002. "The defendants worked for months to prepare the bomb and put it together, held discussions about the bomb's composition ... [and] took the trouble to conduct exploratory missions in order to find an `attractive' site at which to set off the bomb and to determine an appropriate time, one at which there are a large number of passersby at the site," the judges wrote. "They conducted another patrol after daylight savings time went into effect in order to determine whether they needed to change the planned time, lest they miss the hour at which the street is crowded, and even canceled the departure planned for Thursday night for fear that the street would be empty of people on Friday. The site destined for the attack was picked with care. There are no police or Border Police patrols there, and Jews avoid it." "The defendants were also careful to avoid any marks that could identify them. They compartmentalized, took care to wipe away their fingerprints and took care to work with gloves. They bought gasoline in small quantities each time in order to avoid suspicion ... The defendants placed two explosive bricks, two containers of cooking gas and two barrels containing a mixture of oil, gasoline and screws on the cart in order to multiply the effect of the attack. Finally, one wall of the cart was removed in order to focus the shock waves and prevent them from being dispersed." All of these things, the judges concluded, "attest to an effort by the defendants to injure and kill people - passersby and students coming to the school to study. And not in vain was Ofer Gamliel brought into the group; he towed the cart, using the security vehicle of the settlement of Bat Ayin" - to which the group had access because Morag's father was the settlement's security officer. The judges rejected the claim made by the defendants and their lawyers that "they only wanted to ignite a pyre and create a media effect, with the bomb neutralized. In order to ignite a pyre, there is no need for hundreds of liters of oil, two explosive bricks, two containers of cooking gas and a quantity of screws ... The defendants intended a bombing that would injure and kill Arabs as an act of vengeance for the terror attacks against Jews, and to send a message that every coin has two sides." Two other people suspected of belonging to the Bat Ayin cell are being tried separately: Yosef Ben Baruch, who has also been charged with attempted murder, and Noam Federman, accused of illegal weapons possession. Their trials are still in progress. Rabbis denounce Shin Bet Meanwhile, the Council of Yesha Rabbis yesterday issued a sharp denunciation of the Shin Bet security service's behavior in the investigation of another alleged Jewish terror cell (Yesha is a Hebrew acronym for Judea, Samaria and Gaza). That investigation appears to have fizzled, with most of the suspects being released last week. In a letter sent to Shin Bet chief Avi Dichter yesterday, council chairman Rabbi Dov Lior and council member Rabbi Daniel Shilo wrote: "In our view, groping in the dark does not justify arresting people and holding them under difficult and humiliating conditions without the possibility of contacting their families and attorneys ... The impression that emerges is that these people were trampled on and physically and spiritually tortured in the absence of information obtained by professional methods, and to this is added the impression that there is a desire to intimidate people, so that they won't dare to fight for their beliefs. In the meantime, once again an entire population has been stigmatized, once again rumors have been spread about the existence of an alleged underground, and once again people cannot help suspecting that the Shin Bet acts not only as a security agency, but also as a political agency." However, the rabbis stressed that they "object to any private act of violence against Arabs." http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/341454.html If they had been palestinians, there would be a grade school named after them.
Edited by wingnutx (09/18/03 01:47 PM)
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