Policeman turns suicide bomber and kills ten

A Palestinian police swapped his uniform for a suicide bomber’s outfit today and blew himself up on a crowded bus outside Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s residence killing 10 passengers and wounding 50 bystanders.

It was the deadliest attack in four months but did not stop a long planned prisoner exchange between Israel and Lebanese guerrilla group Hezbollah.

The Jerusalem blast sent body parts flying into nearby houses. Shaken survivors crawled out of broken bus windows. A chunk of the bus’ roof landed on top of a two-storey building, and witnesses said there was an overpowering smell of blood and smoke.

Sharon was not home at the time of the attack, claimed by the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, a militant group close to Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement.

The bomber, identified as Ali Jaara, 24, a Palestinian policeman from the Aida refugee camp on the outskirts of Bethlehem, left a note saying that he wanted to avenge eight Palestinians killed in fighting with Israeli troops in the Gaza Strip the day before.

The attack marked another setback for stalled peace efforts. It came at a time when senior US State Department officials were in the region to try to revive the road map plan.

Washington has criticised the Palestinian Authority for not doing enough to stop militants, and the bomber’s ties to the security forces was particularly embarrassing. Bethlehem is one of only a few Palestinian towns not under Israeli military control.

The attack coincided with the German-brokered prisoner swap in Germany and on the Israeli-Lebanese border. It was not clear whether the Al Aqsa militia had timed the bombing to go off during the exchange.

Jaara, who lived in a two-storey home in the West Bank with his parents and nine siblings, was described by relatives as quiet and a devout Muslim who showed little interest in politics.

His father, Munir, said Jaara was the only breadwinner in the house, and had been hoping to start a family.

“I was expecting to marry him, not to bury him,” the father said.

Distraught relatives filled the house, as Jaara’s mother sat on a mattress on the floor, crying uncontrollably. She carried a picture of her son in a police uniform carrying his police-issued Kalashnikov rifle. Many family members said they opposed militant attacks against Israelis.

“These operations are not only not good for us, but really bad for us. They only hurt us,” said his 26-year-old sister, Ola.

Police spokesman Gil Kleiman said the bomber had been carrying about 15 pounds of explosives in a bag and detonated them on the bus just 15 yards from Sharon’s official residence.

Bus passenger Svetlana Minchiker, in her 30s, said she was talking on her mobile phone as the blast went off – a bang that left her so disoriented she thought the phone had exploded.

“At first I did not see anything except my hands,” she said, holding up one hand still stained red. A trickle of dried blood marked her left cheek.

“As my feelings slowly returned to me, I managed to crawl through the window.”

The green bus was charred, with wires dangling everywhere. One side of the bus had been blown out and the back half of the roof was blown off. Eli Beer, a paramedic, said victims had been scattered over a wide area.

“There were a lot of heavy injuries, a lot of the people who were injured were in bad condition, a lot of people had missing limbs,” he said.

Bret Stephens, editor in chief of the Jerusalem Post, was near the scene at the time of the blast. “There was glass everywhere, human remains everywhere, shoes, feet, pieces of guts,” he said.

It was the deadliest attack since a female suicide bomber killed 21 people at a seaside restaurant in Haifa in October. The last bombing inside Israel was a suicide attack at a bus stop outside Tel Aviv that killed four people on Christmas Eve.

Israeli officials said the weeks of calm preceding the bombing were a result of Israeli security measures, not a reduction in violence on the Palestinian side.

In response, Sharon and his foreign minister, Silvan Shalom, cancelled a planned meeting on the humanitarian crisis in the Palestinian areas that was to include the Americans, Palestinians and international donors.

In a statement, they said “it is not the time” to discuss the easing of restrictions on Palestinians “when innocent Israeli citizens are murdered in the streets of the capital.”

Palestinian Authority officials condemned the bombing but Abdel Aziz Rantissi, a Hamas leader in Gaza, praised the attack. “It’s not important who carried out this operation. The only thing which is very important is that we are resisting occupiers who came to occupy our land and to kill our people,” he said.