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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: marcos who wrote (105145)	7/13/2003 5:56:10 PM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

This is interesting (imo): Israel Arrests Irish Bombmaker in West Bank By GREG MYRE ERUSALEM, July 13 — Israel has arrested a suspected Irish bombmaker who entered the country three weeks ago and traveled to the West Bank to train Palestinians in making explosives, a security official said today. The official declined to identify the man, but said he arrived last month on a British passport at Ben Gurion International Airport, near Tel Aviv. He was detained on Saturday at a checkpoint near Ramallah, just north of Jerusalem, Israel radio reported. The man is being interrogated by the Shin Bet security service, said the official, who declined to be identified. Britain's Observer newspaper reported today that the man was a member of the Irish Republican Army who joined a splinter guerrilla group known as the Real I.R.A., which formed after objecting to the 1997 I.R.A. cease-fire agreement that led to a peace accord. The newspaper said it knew the identity of the man, whom it said was 40 years old, but could not name him for legal reasons. There was no word about which Palestinian faction the man was supposed to be working with. Three leading Palestinian groups, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah, declared a truce on June 29, and the level of Mideast violence has declined substantially since then. The Palestinians have carried out almost 100 suicide bombings against Israel since the current round of fighting broke out in September 2000. But the frequency of the attacks has dropped over the past year, with Israel arresting thousands of Palestinian suspects and carrying out dozens of targeted killings. Israel says that its security forces have killed or arrested many Palestinian bombmakers, and claims that Palestinian groups have been trying to import such expertise. Still, it has been rare for foreigners to be linked directly to the fighting here. In one of the few instances, two British Muslims took part in a suicide bombing at a bar on the Tel Aviv beachfront on April 30. One bomber killed himself and three people at the bar. The second man fled when his bomb apparently malfunctioned. His body was found in shallow water near the beach almost two weeks later. In another development today, Israel called on the Palestinians to help find an Israeli taxi driver who has been missing for two days. The driver, Eliyahu Gorel, 61, vanished on Friday after dropping off passengers in Jerusalem, Israeli officials said. On Saturday, he telephoned his family from the nearby Palestinian city of Ramallah, in the West Bank, saying he was well before the call was cut off. Later, a man accent called Mr. Gorel's family to say he had been kidnapped, but that he would not be harmed, officials said. Mr. Gorel's car was found, with the engine still running, in an Arab neighborhood in east Jerusalem, not far from Ramallah. "There is a sincere concern that terrorist motives stand behind Gorel's kidnapping," Israel's military said in a statement. The Palestinian security forces were assisting in the search for Mr. Gorel, Palestinian officials said.