Posted on 03/26/2012 3:19:28 PM PDT by Milagros
Killer: Jews my target
Cabby in 94 Bklyn Bridge outrage fesses
By LARRY CELONA
Last Updated: 4:33 AM, March 26, 2012
Posted: 3:13 AM, March 26, 2012
The livery driver whose two-gun attack on a group of Hasidic students on the Brooklyn Bridge shocked the city 18 years ago has finally admitted that he targeted them because they were Jewish, The Post has learned.
Rashid Baz was convicted in 1995 of murdering Yeshiva student Ari Halberstam, 16, and trying to kill more than a dozen others in a van with a hail of bullets he fired on a Manhattan approach to the bridge on March 1, 1994.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Ari Halberstam, a yeshivah student, was killed when Rashid Baz opened fire on the 15 passengers on the bridge between Manhattan and Brooklyn. Two others were seriously wounded.
The bus had been taking the group home after a visit to the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, then in a Manhattan hospital for minor surgery.
Baz, a Lebanese immigrant, was convicted of murder. He maintained that the motive was a traffic disagreement. But it has now emerged that he also told police at the time that the murder was planned and that his victims were targeted because of their race.
He reportedly told detectives that he had followed the bus in his car, adding: “I only shot them because they were Jewish.”
Baz was sentenced to a minimum of 141 years behind bars, so the new information will not be used to pursue a hate crime charge.
When he was sentenced, the judge who presided over the case said he would recommend “against the release of this defendant on parole”.
http://www.thejc.com/news/world-news/65706/brooklyn-bridge-gunman-admitted-he-wanted-kill-jews
Brooklyn Bridge killer finally admits he picked targets of 1994 attacks because they were Jewish
By Daily Mail Reporter
PUBLISHED: 07:16 EST, 26 March 2012 | UPDATED: 11:13 EST, 26 March 2012
The cab driver who gunned down a group of Jewish students in New York 18 years ago has admitted the attack was racially motivated.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2120479/Rashid-Baz-1994-Brooklyn-Bridge-killer-finally-admits-chose-targets-Jewish.html
Rashid Baz, killer of Ari Halberstam in 1994, admits to anti-Semitic motive
March 26, 2012
NEW YORK (JTA) — Rashid Baz, the Lebanese cab driver convicted in the 1994 murder of Ari Halberstam, admitted that he had been looking to kill some Jews that day, the New York Post reported.
Baz, who is serving a 141-year prison sentence, opened fire on a van full of Chasidic youths on a ramp approach to the Brooklyn Bridge on March 1, 1994, just days after the Hebron massacre of 29 Arabs by Baruch Goldstein. The attack killed Halberstam, a 16-year-old yeshiva student, and left another boy critically injured.
For years, Bazs defense was that the shooting was the result of a traffic accident, and the FBI initially classified the incident as a case of road rage. But Halberstams mother, Devorah Halberstam, waged an aggressive public campaign to have the shooting recognized as a terrorist attack, and numerous officials rallied to her cause. Federal officials eventually reversed their analysis.
Several years after the shooting, New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani renamed the ramp approach to the bridge in Ari Halberstams honor.
In 2007, Baz finally confessed that the killing was not the result of a chance encounter but that he had been looking to kill some Jews, the Post reported. Though the confession is several years old, it was only reported this week.
Baz told investigators that he followed the van, which had been trailing the motorcade of the Lubavitcher rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, for more than two miles before the shooting, according to the Post. He was carrying three weapons with him, including a machine gun that he had moved from the trunk of his car into the cab before the shooting.
I only shot them because they were Jewish, Baz reportedly said in his confession.
http://www.jta.org/news/article/2012/03/26/3092332/rashid-baz-killer-of-ari-halberstam-in-1994-admits-to-anti-semitic-motive
Jes’ doin’ what the Kookran tells ‘em to do, after all.
On March 1, 1994, Rashid Baz, a Muslim immigrant from Lebanon, sprayed a van traversing the Brooklyn Bridge with gunfire. . His target was a group of fifteen Hasidic students. He killed one, Ari Halberstam, age sixteen, and seriously injured three others. The gunman's motives were said to be "concern" about events in the Middle East, but both ABC and the New York Daily News reported that he was connected to the Shiite Muslim guerrilla group Hizbollah.
Gabriel Schoenfeld, "The return of anti-semitism," Encounter Books, 2004, 193 pp.) p. 104
Obama: If I Had A Son Hed Look Like Merah.
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