By Jerusalem Newswire Editorial Staff
Mar 17, 2005
A group of five Israeli Arabs was indicted by the Jerusalem District Court Thursday on charges of planning a series of terrorist attacks against their Jewish countrymen in order to gain the approval of Al Qaeda.
The suspects range in age from 17 to 23.
According to the indictment, they planned to bomb the Knesset, murder a Druze IDF soldier and steal his weapon, rob and kill a Jewish gas station attendant, attack an IDF checkpoint near Jerusalem, and carry out an attack in a Druze village in northern Israel aimed at inflaming Druze-Christian violence.
The five hoped that following this string of attacks, they would be contacted by Osama bin Laden’s organization and asked to establish a permanent Al Qaeda cell in Israel.
The group’s ringleader, 20-year-old Morad Elian, recruited the other members at the Al Aqsa Mosque atop Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, Arutz 7 reported.
Israeli and Palestinian Arabs regularly use the ancient Jewish holy site as a place to stir up anti-Israel sentiment and incite violence against the country’s Jews.