US-PALESTINE: Doubts Grow Over Hamas Role in Bomb Plot

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Aug 4 1997 (IPS) - U.S. officials continue to puzzle over whether two Palestinian men seized last Thursday for allegedly planning to bomb a subway station were influenced by Islamic fundamentalism, and particularly the Palestinian group Hamas.

For now, officials say, there is no clear evidence linking Hamas to the men, 23-year-old Gazi Ibrahim Abu Mazer and 22-year- old Lafi Khalil. Both men were arraigned in connection with the bomb plot over the weekend while they recuperated in hospital from being shot by police in a pre-dawn raid on their Brooklyn apartment. Hamas in the past has claimed responsibility for terrorist attacks in Israel.

After three days of extensive investigation, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and other agencies “have not established any direct relationship” between the two men and Hamas or other terrorist groups, Samuel Berger, the U.S. national security adviser, told reporters Sunday.

Hamas itself has quickly moved to distance itself from Abu Mazer and Khalil, asserting that it attacks only targets within Israel. “Hamas targets only the Zionist occupation by its jihad, and its battlefield is Palestine,” the group said in a message faxed to news agencies Saturday. There has not been “any relationship between us and those who were detained” for the bomb plot, the group added.

The organisation’s political leader, Mousa Abu Marzook – who was himself detained as a suspected terrorist in the United States until his deportation to Jordan last May – was equally categorical in denying responsibility for the bomb plot. “Hamas is not to target any objective outside Palestine, and we are sure there are no Hamaz activities outside Palestine,” he told CBS News.

Not everyone is convinced, however. New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani criticised Hamas as a terrorist group whose disclaimers cannot be believed. “I would take what they said, throw it away, and listen to what the FBI and other authorities say,” he said.

Yet, even U.S. intelligence sources seem baffled by Abu Mazer and Khalil, who were arrested after a roommate, Abdul Rahman Mossabah, called police last Wednesday to warn them that the two men were building bombs.

Some FBI officials have anonymously connected both men to Hamas, and U.S. investigators are travelling to Israel this week to further examine any possible links. But James Kallstrom, head of the FBI’s New York office, said it is “totally wrong to say these individuals are connected to and directed by Hamas.”

If Hamas is involved, it would represent a significant shift in the group’s tactics – particularly after more than a year of relative quiet by the Islamist movement as Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority gathered more control over the Israeli- occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The group’s silence may already have been broken with last Wednesday’s suicide bomb attack in a Jerusalem marketplace, in which 15 people were killed. Hamas has denied responsibility for the attack, but was blamed by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s government for the killings.

The New York subway bomb plot, if it had been carried out, would have likely resulted in the worst foreign attack on U.S. soil since the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing, in which six people were killed.

Police experts say that the bomb allegedly constructed by Abu Mazer and Khalil would have destroyed anything within 25 square feet, and was intended to be exploded on a widely-used Brooklyn subway station Friday. “I think we were close to a disaster here,” Kallstrom said.

The nature of the plot, and the vague status of the two Palestinians, prompted Stanley Cohen, Marzook’s U.S. attorney, to dismiss them as “cowboys.” Arab and Muslim groups in the United States also deplored Abu Mazer’s and Khalil’s actions and portrayed them as dangerous rogues.

“Its clear that these men, while both Palestinians, are not practising (Muslims),” argued Fahhim Abdulhadi, spokesman for the Washington-based American Muslim Council. “Their own families say they’re not Muslims, that they don’t practise (Islam).”

Abdulhadi added that the two men do not fit the standard profile of a Hamas suicide bomber: that of a homeless, unemployed and uneducated youth. Khalil’s family, who live in Jordan, and Abu Mazer’s, who live in the West Bank town of Hebron, described both men as apolitical and intent on succeeding in the United States.

Both men’s personal data, however, coNtain a plethora of unusual details. Abu Mazer, in an application for asylum to the United States which he withdrew last month, claimed that Israel had tortured him in the incorrect belief that he worked for Hamas. His older brother Nour has been quoted in newspaper accounts here as dismissing that claim and saying Abu Mazer “exaggerated a lot.”

Cohen and Marzook implied that Khalil, on the other hand, may have worked as an Israeli informant. “We’ve spoken to Khalil’s family,” Cohen told IPS. “He’s considered a traitor – they think he informed on Palestinians.” As a result, the attorney argued, “if they’re connected to any organisation it is to the (Israeli intelligence groups) Shin Bet and Mossad.” Israel Monday refused to confirm or deny whether Khalil had ever been an informant.

Lost in the debate over the two men’s connections is the fact that most terrorist activity in the United States is undertaken by right-wing, U.S.-based militia and extremist groups, said Sam Husseini, media director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.

Just last month, Husseini said, police uncovered a militia plot which also involved planting pipe bombs, which received almost no media attention. But the Brooklyn case, he argued, “plays into the stereotypes of crazed Arab terrorists running around.”