Bomber Posing as Orthodox Jew Adds to Terror

JERUSALEM —  The suicide bomber was dressed as an ultra-Orthodox Jew: black pants, beard, a skullcap. Still, he aroused suspicions on crowded Prophets Street during Tuesday’s morning rush hour.

As two police officers approached and demanded that he stop, the man turned, smiled and reached for a bag slung across his back. In a split second, the Palestinian blew himself up, hurling pieces of his body and dagger-like metal projectiles more than 30 feet. At least 15 Israelis were injured, including the officer closest to him, whose condition was critical.

The blast occurred on a narrow, traffic-choked portion of the downtown street outside a French-language school, the Lycee Francais, and a busy hospital, where doctors came out of the emergency room and onto the sidewalk to attend to victims. Children on their way to school narrowly avoided serious injury.

The bomber’s head was blasted into the air and rolled into the school’s courtyard before the horrified eyes of sobbing young children. Police quickly covered it with an empty trash can. Workers spent much of the morning using high-powered water jets to remove blood from the school’s century-old stone facade and iron gates.

It was the fifth Jerusalem bombing in less than 36 hours, a sudden upsurge in a city already on panicked edge at the certain prospect of more death and destruction close to home. Israelis, especially in Jerusalem, feel besieged by random violence and terror caused by suicide bombings and car bomb attacks--assaults that are increasing as the Palestinian uprising nears its first anniversary.

A suicide bombing last month at a pizzeria just a block from Tuesday’s blast killed 16 people, including several children. About a dozen bombs have detonated or been detected in the downtown area alone in recent months.

“I always knew something like this could happen; we simply hoped it wouldn’t happen here,” said the Hebrew teacher at the Lycee Francais, who looked stunned as she sat on the school steps inside the institution’s compound. She did not want her named used.

Pierre Weill, a reporter based in Jerusalem for Radio France, was dropping off his 12-year-old daughter for school when he heard the blast.

“My car was splattered with pieces of flesh and blood,” he told reporters at the chaotic scene. “My daughter was also covered with bits of flesh and blood.” She was among those treated for injuries.

Students on their way to the English-language Anglican International School, one block from the French school, were among the people caught in traffic who witnessed the bomber blow himself up. Parents and children alike arrived at the school in tears. Some school vans en route to the campus turned back.

Both schools are attended by the children of diplomats, foreign journalists and employees of international organizations. Guards from the U.S., British and French embassies were dispatched to the schools to provide added security. Children talked to counselors or spent extra time in homeroom to cope with what they saw or felt.

“We try to give them some sense of normalcy, that life doesn’t have to stop and give in to the crisis,” said Chris Wright, principal of the Anglican school, where posters promoting coexistence line the walls and children hail from the three monotheistic faiths. Its students come from 33 nations--including Israel and the United States--and from Palestinian territory.

“We are a school. There are enough children being scarred physically and psychologically by what is happening that we try to keep the campus as normal as possible,” Wright said. “We can’t protect them completely from the hostilities all around, but the important message to the children is that here you are safe, you are physically secure, and emotionally and psychologically you can say what you want and people will listen.”

The European Union’s top political envoy, Javier Solana, in town to try to promote a renewal of truce talks between Israel and the Palestinians, visited the site of the bombing and condemned the terrorist attack. He was heckled by bitter Israelis who told him to “go home.”

Tuesday’s bombing will only push the two sides further from any desire to sit and talk. Although no one claimed responsibility for the attack, Israeli officials blamed Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, saying he has done nothing to staunch terrorism. Arafat, in Gaza City, condemned the bombing and “attacks that hurt civilians, whether they are Palestinian or Israeli.”

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was in Moscow, where he met with President Vladimir V. Putin and reportedly asked that Russia exert its influence with Arafat. In public, Putin said only that his nation hopes to make a “substantial contribution” to ending the violence.

In Jerusalem, Sharon’s office announced a series of beefed-up security measures for the city, including the deployment of soldiers to patrol alongside police officers.

Police speculated that the bomber might have chosen to disguise himself as a religious Jew to better blend in as he moved deeper into western Jerusalem. He took a route that skirted the ultra-Orthodox Mea Shearim neighborhood, and Prophets Street is often replete with observant Jews in their distinctive dress.

The street is also used frequently by Palestinian workers walking to their jobs. But Palestinians are increasingly stopped by police as Jerusalem remains on high alert.

On Monday, a Palestinian wearing a heavy winter coat--the kind of garb used in the past to conceal belts laden with explosives--was stopped near Prophets Street, roughed up and arrested by police who believed he had a bomb. The police agents blew up a package the man was carrying, but no bomb was discovered. Police said he did have a knife.

When he was stopped by police, Tuesday’s bomber was believed to have been on his way to a more crowded part of downtown, possibly the nearby Mahane Yehuda market, a frequent target in the past.

“Had he succeeded in getting to a more populated area, it would have been much, much worse,” police spokesman Gil Kleiman said.

Sgt. Maj. Guy Mugrabi, one of the two officers from the paramilitary Border Police who confronted the bomber, said he and his partner began to pursue the man in a skullcap, who appeared nervous and was moving unusually fast.

“Only when we were four meters away did we order him to stop,” Mugrabi told reporters from his hospital bed. “He stopped and turned halfway toward us, with the bag facing us, smiled, stretched his right hand toward his bag, to the outside pocket. That same second we put our hands on our guns, [but] before we were able to take them out, he exploded.”

Mugrabi’s partner was standing between him and the bomber and therefore took the brunt of the blast.

“I saw my life pass in front of me,” Mugrabi said, recalling his thoughts in the split second when he watched the bomber disintegrate and he and his partner were thrown to the ground by the force of the blast.

“I thought of my girlfriend, my mother, of everything that is precious to me. It was like a movie. . . . You can’t think anything, you’re in the hands of God.”

Times staff writer Maura Reynolds in Moscow contributed to this report.