Pair hid bomb gear in Koran

By ERIC SILVER AND CAHAL MILMO in Jerusalem

The two British Muslims who attacked a Tel Aviv bar last week, killing three Israelis, smuggled sophisticated explosive material from abroad inside a copy of the Koran, the Israeli Defence Minister said yesterday.

Shlomo Mofaz told his cabinet colleagues that Asif Mohammed Hanif, 21, and Omar Khan Sharif, 27, initially crossed the Allenby Bridge from Jordan, then made their way to Gaza, where they were said to have had contacts in Hamas. Investigators suspect they may have received training in Syria.

Using their British passports, they entered through a tourist gate, where security checks were less rigorous than at the gate used by Arabs, the minister said. They enjoyed the same privilege when they crossed from Gaza into Israel on their mission to Tel Aviv.

Hanif, from Hounslow, west London, blew himself up outside Mike's Place, a popular music pub on the Tel Aviv seafront. Israeli police were still hunting yesterday for Derby-born Sharif, who fled the scene either because he had second thoughts or because his bomb failed to detonate.

Six people, including the wife, two sisters and brother of Sharif, were being questioned by police in London yesterday on suspicion of helping to mastermind the attack, which injured more than 60 people.

In Israel, a magistrate has barred publication of details of the investigation, but border checks on foreigners have been tightened.

Security forces are embarrassed that men with Muslim names slipped in so easily, particularly Hanif, whose passport indicated that he was born in Pakistan. A few weeks ago, Pakistan was added to the list of states whose nationals were barred from entering Israel.

But officials no longer suspected that the two bombers entered Israel under cover of the pro-Palestinian International Solidarity Movement (ISM), they said yesterday.

A spokesman for the pro-Palestine movement confirmed that the pair attended a memorial meeting for Rachel Corrie, a human shield crushed to death by an Israeli Army bulldozer.

Ministers have proposed turning back newly arriving activists and deporting those in Israel, but ISM spokesmen said they had heard nothing official to that effect.

In Britain, MI5 officers admitted the two suicide bombers had slipped through security checks designed to identify potential hardline Muslim activists.

Despite knowing Hanif and Sharif had attended meetings of the radical group al-Muhajiroun, intelligence officers had not considered the two men to be potential terrorists, sources said.

Special Branch officers were ordered to the Normanton area of Derby, where Sharif lived, after it became clear that the two Britons were involved in the bombing.

Scotland Yard anti-terrorist branch officers arrested the six suspects in a series of raids across the Midlands and London. They are Sharif's wife, Tahira; his sisters, Parveen and Nasreen; his brother, Zahid; Tahira's brother, Amar Jazira; and a friend, Zahid Ahmed.

They can be held for up to seven days under the Terrorism Act 2000 on suspicion of being involved in the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism.

pf* The bullet that killed James Miller, a British television cameraman, in a Gaza refugee camp on Friday, entered his neck from behind, although he had been facing an Israeli armoured personnel carrier, the Israeli Army said yesterday.

A spokesman for the Army said the information came from medical evidence.

He speculated that a Palestinian gunman might have hit the cameraman in an exchange of fire.


- INDEPENDENT