Bus blast kills 19

UPDATE

JERUSALEM - A Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up on a bus packed with high school students and office workers yesterday, killing 19 people and wounding more than 50 in the deadliest attack in Jerusalem in six years.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon vowed to fight "Palestinian terror" as he surveyed the carnage.

The attack could undermine US President George W. Bush's plan to lay out a framework for Middle East peace this week.

The blast lifted bus number 32 in south Jerusalem off the ground and reduced it to charred wreckage, shortly after the United States and Yasser Arafat criticised Israel's plans to build a security fence at its West Bank frontier, through which attackers slip into Israel.

"Bodies were piled up near the door of the bus on the right side," said Shalom Sabag, who was driving his car in front of the bus and rushed to help pull out dead and wounded.

"I took off the bodies of two girls and a man. There was one girl I cannot forget. She had a long braid down her back and she lay on her stomach," he said.

"There was a man with his hand wounded but every time we touched him he screamed."

A medic said many of the wounded were children and teenagers.

Police had been on alert after intelligence reports pointed to a suicide bomber in the area.

"This terrible thing that we are seeing is the continuation of the Palestinian terror, and we must fight and struggle against this terror and this is what we will do," Sharon said in what Israeli media said was his first visit to a bombing scene.

Surrounded by bodyguards and police, Sharon walked past a line of body bags, some with feet sticking out, and approached the wreckage of the bus.

The radical Islamic group Hamas later claimed responsibility in a phone call to a news agency.

The anonymous caller said Hamas' armed wing, the Ezzedin Al-Qassam Brigades, carried out the operation.

Israeli officials were swift to point the finger of blame.

"The Jerusalem attack indicates that the Palestinian Authority continues to export terror into Israel," said David Baker, an official in Sharon's office. "Terror flows from the PA like an open faucet."

Palestinian Cabinet member Saeb Erekat denounced the bombing and denied responsibility.

"The Palestinian Authority condemns this attack and repeats its position of not condoning the killing of civilians, both Palestinians and Israelis," he said.

The latest bombing took place as Bush was preparing a framework for creating an independent Palestinian state with a constitution and unified security force.

US officials had said announcement of Bush's vision, which could include a recommendation for a provisional Palestinian state with temporary borders and limited sovereignty, could be imminent.

The bombing also coincided with growing controversy over the launch on Sunday of an Israeli project to erect a 110km barrier along the border with the West Bank.

Israel, meanwhile, kept up its assault on militants.

In an assault that Palestinians called an assassination, Israeli soldiers in a position overlooking the West Bank village of El Khader shot dead a militant from the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said the United States was worried that the Israeli fence, to be built over the next year, would make life harder for ordinary Palestinians when Israel should be easing restrictions on their movements.

"The issue of borders between Israel living side-by-side with a future Palestinian state is one that needs to be resolved through negotiation," Boucher said.

Arafat called the fence project "an act of racism".

- REUTERS

Feature: Middle East

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