Published and televised reports Friday linked three men arrested in an alleged plot to bomb New York City subways to Hamas, the Islamic extremist group under suspicion in the two suicide bombings in Jerusalem this week that killed 15 people.
The FBI, however, said its global investigation hadn’t yet produced a link between the terrorist group and the three suspects–one of whom allegedly tried to detonate one of five explosive devices during a raid by New York police early Thursday. The agency also did not indicate a tie to Wednesday’s Jerusalem bombings or the 1993 bomb attack on the World Trade Center.
Authorities acknowledged that one suspect, Gazi Ibrahim Abu Mezer, 23, indicated on a U.S. asylum application that Israeli police had arrested him for being a member of a “known terrorist group.” Officials did not specify the terrorist group.
“There’s no question that part of the motivation here or part of the intent was to attack the U.S., to attack Israel and to attack Jewish interests in New York and, possibly, globally,” said New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who did not fully explain his remarks.
Citing an unnamed FBI source, The Associated Press reported that the group to which Abu Mezer had been linked by Israeli authorities was Hamas. The news service also said intelligence operatives had identified one of the two other suspects as a member of Hamas, which promotes Islamic rule on all land that formerly was Palestinian, including Israel.
CBS News reported that the men arrested in Brooklyn, as well as the two suicide bombers responsible for the Jerusalem market explosion, worked for Mousa Abu Marzook, a Hamas political leader who had been accused and jailed in the U.S. for suspected terrorist activities and was deported to Jordan earlier this year.
Also arrested in Thursday’s raid were Lafi Khalil, 22, who, along with Abu Mezer, was shot during his arrest, and Abdul Rahman Mossabah, 31, an Egyptian who arrived in the U.S. recently.
The arrests came four days before the second trial of Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, the explosives expert believed to have masterminded the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Yousef and two others were convicted last August of plotting to blow up U.S. jetliners to punish the United States for its support of Israel.
The family of Abu Mezer expressed shock when they heard he had been arrested in an alleged terrorist plot.
“My brother is a quiet and clever person. He has an open mind. He has never joined Hamas or the Islamic Jihad,” said his brother, Nur Abu Mezer, a Hebron lawyer. “He doesn’t have any extremist thought.”
Abu Mezer left the West Bank city three years ago after finishing high school, stopped off in Canada, then moved on to the U.S., explaining that opportunities were better there, according to family members.
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Khalil hails from Ajoul, a remote village in the Judean hills near Ramallah in the West Bank.
His uncle, Suhail Khalil, said Lafi left the West Bank in November 1996 for Jordan, where he picked up a visa for Mexico. From there he went to Los Angeles and then to Brooklyn.
FBI Deputy Director James Kallstrom said the three arrests averted a “disaster.” The trio in “less than a day” planned to bomb Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue train station, which services more than 40,000 commuters daily.