Israel Matzav

Police thwart pre-election bombing

When I drove to the airport yesterday to get my father, I had no choice but to take Route 443 (the "back road") because Highway 1 between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv (which passes alongside the airport) was closed between Jerusalem and just before the airport for quite a while. There was lots of excitement there....

Following a dramatic highspeed chase, Jerusalem police on Tuesday intercepted a van on the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway transporting a Palestinian on his way to carry out a suicide-bombing in the center of the country, Jerusalem police chief Ilan Franco said.

The van, stopped near Kibbutz Sha'alabim, transported 10 Palestinians along with a bag containing between five and seven kilograms of explosives packed with shrapnel.

The would-be bomber, a man in his 20s who is affiliated with Islamic Jihad, is from the West Bank village of Yamoun, where a 10-year-old Palestinian girl was killed in a botched IDF operation last week.

Tuesday's high-speed drama began shortly after noon when police, aided by a helicopter, gave chase to a white van as it left the capital. Jerusalem had been placed under a red alert an hour earlier as a result of intelligence information regarding an imminent terror attack.

The driver of the van, an east Jerusalem resident, was transporting Palestinians who had illegally entered Israel and aroused the suspicions of police. When he ignored their orders to stop the vehicle, a 15-minute high-speed chase ensued on the country's main highway with police vehicles, sirens blaring, in hot pursuit as the van raced past two makeshift checkpoints.

The van was forced to stop by traffic caused by multiple roadblocks erected by police on the highway. Police officers, their guns drawn, surrounded the vehicle and ordered the driver out of the van.

In the tense moments that followed, police discovered that there were no fewer than 10 men inside the vehicle whose tinted windows had kept them hidden from view, said police officer Ofer Dror, who was involved in the chase.

After all the men were arrested, police sappers accompanied by bomb-sniffing dogs entered the vehicle and found the bag of explosives hidden inside, setting off panic among nearby motorists.

Following the discovery of the explosives, police ordered all the van's passengers to strip down to their underwear and lie face-down on the ground to be searched for explosive belts.

As the saga unfolded, traffic on the four-lane highway ground to a halt, with massive traffic jams reported on the road throughout the early afternoon hours, both during and after the Hollywoodthriller-like chase.

It was not immediately clear whether the vehicle's driver or passengers had been aware that a suicide bomber was traveling with them. [I would bet they were all aware of it. Certainly the driver was - otherwise he would have stopped when the police told him to stop. CiJ]

Security officials theorized that the would-be bomber did not detonate the explosives in the vehicle because of the nine other Palestinian passengers around him.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 3:55 PM