Posted on 07/02/2008 7:52:58 AM PDT by drzz
Three people were killed and 66 were wounded - one moderately and the rest lightly - on Wednesday afternoon when a bulldozer driver went on a rampage in downtown Jerusalem.
The attack, at the junction of Jaffa Road and Sarei Yisrael St., set off a panic in the area and left a large swath of damage in the heart of the capital. Traffic was halted, and hundreds of people fled through the streets in panic as medics treated the wounded.
A car was dragged several meters by the bulldozer before being crushed under the vehicle. The parents of a baby being treated in Sha'arei Tzedek Hospital have yet to be tracked down, and it is believed that the baby was thrown out of the car by one of his parents before the vehicle was crushed.
A policewoman was first to react, firing at the bulldozer and apparently hitting the terrorist. Another policeman then climbed onto the vehicle and was lightly wounded in a struggle with the attacker.
Finally, an off-duty soldier took a gun from a security guard at the scene and shot the terrorist, who cried "Allah Akhbar" (God is great) before being killed. The soldier, Moshe Plesser, was assisted in neutralizing the attacker by Eli Mizrahi, a member of police's elite Yasam anti-terror unit.
Plesser, 18, is the brother-in-law of IDF officer David Shapira, who killed the terrorist in the Mercaz Harav Yeshiva attack on March 6.
Police said the incident was definitely a terror attack, but stressed that they had no specific warning. Three Palestinian terror groups claimed responsibility for the attack, but security officials said the killer was acting on his own.
Police added that the terrorist, Jabr Duwait, a 30-year-old father of two from Sur Bahir in southeast Jerusalem, was carrying an Israeli identity card. They said he had a criminal record and was employed by the construction company working on the Jerusalem light rail project. The man drove the bulldozer out of the construction site before perpetrating the attack.
"My son never spoke of plans to carry out such an attack, if he had I would have tried to prevent it," Duwait's father Tayseer told The Media Line as police officers came to question him.
Nevertheless, Israel Radio reported that a woman started singing in praise of the terrorist when security forces left the home.
Rescue services confirmed three deaths, and the bodies lay on the ground covered in plastic.
"I saw the bulldozer smash the car with its shovel. He smashed the guy sitting in the driver's seat," said Yaakov Ashkenazi, an 18-year-old seminary student.
Esther Valencia, a 52-year-old pedestrian said she barely escaped the carnage. "He almost hit me. Someone pushed me out of the way at the last moment. It was a miracle that I got out of there."
Sixteen-year-old Eyal Lang Ben-Hur was in a bus when the driver yelled out, "Get out of the vehicle! Everyone out!" People fled in a panic, he said, and the bus was hit an instant later.
Asaf Shalev, who was near the scene of the attack, told The Jerusalem Post that he heard about "an accident" and ran to the area. He described a path of destruction" leading from the construction site, and numerous policemen "examining the bulldozer."
I believe the death toll is now 5. That’s what the uploader of one of the videos said at YouTube.
ping. Here’s the new thread. Not sure why the old one disappeared.
Now the thread is posted in bloggers? Aaaaaargh. Very few FReepers will see it here.
Watched the video. It appears to be a Cat front end loader, not a bulldozer.
ask the admin about that.....
That’s not a bulldozer, it’s a front end loader.
Does this mean that the pro-terrorist supporters will stop holding protests outside of Caterpillar world headquarters?
Looks like the guy with the blue shirt and the handgun is the one that finally stopped the terrorist. And ahead of LEO with riot gear and a rifle. Another example of why Scalia was right.
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