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| Europe |
| Details on the thwarted Hungarian plot |
| 2004-04-14 |
| Police arrested three Arabs on Tuesday in an alleged plot to bomb a Jewish museum two days before Israeli President Moshe Katsav was to inaugurate Budapest's Holocaust Memorial Center. An aide to Katsav and Israeli diplomats said the president, who came to Budapest on Tuesday for a three-day visit, was the target of the conspiracy. One Israeli analyst suggested the plot may have been motivated by Israel's assassination last month of Sheik Ahmed Yassin, founder of the Islamic militant group Hamas. Although Hamas vowed revenge against Israeli leaders, Hungarian police said they found no link to Hamas in this plot and had no concrete evidence linking Katsav's visit to the planned attack. In Jerusalem, Boaz Ganor, an anti-terror expert from Israel's Herzliya Interdisciplinary Institute, said Hamas might be trying to show "that it has the capability of acting abroad," despite pledging to restrict its attacks to Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. Hamas denied any involvement in a plot to kill Katsav. "I can certainly say that Hamas has nothing to do with this matter," Hamas representative Osama Hamdan told The Associated Press in Beirut, Lebanon. Senior Hungarian law enforcement officials denied a link between the arrests and Katsav's visit. "There is no connection whatsoever between today's official visit by the Israeli president and the police action taken this morning," said National Police Commissioner Laszlo Salgo. Police said the main suspect was a 42-year-old dentist of Palestinian origin who holds Hungarian citizenship and is the spiritual head of a small Islamic group in Budapest. Monitored phone calls of the suspect revealed he had asked acquaintances for explosives "to blow up a Jewish museum," said Police Lt. Col. Attila Petofi of the National Investigation Agency. There are two Jewish museums in the capital, a small permanent exhibit and the larger Holocaust Center. Although there were no immediate links to terror organizations such as al-Qaida, the possibility of such a connection was one of the main lines of the police investigation, said Police Col. Gyorgy Zsombok. The timing of Tuesday's police operation and statements by Israeli officials suggested fears the plot may have been planned for Thursday's inauguration of the Holocaust Memorial Center. Katsav, in comments to Israeli TV Channel Two, said Hungarian authorities at first told him he had been the target "but later the authorities clarified that it was still under investigation." "I know at first there was an indication that they wanted to harm me, but there is no certainty of that." Speaking on condition of anonymity, a law enforcement official told The Associated Press police were tipped off to the plot by another man of Palestinian origin who allegedly was recruited to carry out the planned bombing. The second Palestinian and a Syrian national had been in police custody suspected of car theft and other crimes when their connection with the plot was discovered. Two other Syrians were also detained and questioned in the terrorism case Tuesday, but were not suspects, police said. The investigation so far had turned up no explosives, detonating devices or weapons, police said. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |
| #2 The Al-Qaeda network was not linked to a plot to bomb a Jewish museum in Hungary during Israeli President Moshe Katsav's visit, the national police's counter-terrorism chief said, a foreign news agency reported on Wednesday. You sure of that, are you? "According to our current information there is no link with the Al-Qaeda network or with international terrorist organisations," Gyorgy Zsombork said. "However we are continuing to analyse kilogrammes of documents, most of them written in Arab, that we confiscated yesterday in house searches." I'll take that as a "No", then. |
| Posted by: Steve 2004-04-14 11:33:15 AM |
| #1 These Arabs immigrants sure do contribute a lot to their adopted new homelands. |
| Posted by: Mike Sylwester 2004-04-14 8:39:50 AM |