Suicide bomber in Jewish guise

JERUSALEM - A Palestinian suicide bomber disguised as a bearded ultra-Orthodox Jew blew himself up in West Jerusalem yesterday, wounding at least 12 people, after police stopped him on the pavement for questioning.

"Policemen saw that he was an Arab who dressed up as a Jew and stopped him," Jerusalem police chief Mickey Levy told reporters.

"They prevented a much greater tragedy by stopping him before he could reach a busier area."

One of the policemen was critically injured.

The explosion occurred on central Nivvim St in downtown Jerusalem, a block from a pizza restaurant where a Palestinian suicide bomber killed 15 people on August 9. There was no immediate claim of responsibility.

Levy said the suicide bomber "was blown completely apart".

Several cars were damaged in the explosion, which coincided with efforts by Javier Solana, the European Union's foreign policy chief, to arrange talks between Palestinian President Yasser Arafat and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres.

In Durban the hosts South Africa yesterday sought compromise wording on the Middle East that could save a United Nations conference on racism from failure after the United States and Israel pulled out.

Both countries withdrew in protest at language in conference drafts that branded Israel as racist for its treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories.

"Today, I have instructed our representatives at the world conference to return home," US Secretary of State Colin Powell said in a statement issued in Durban.

Powell assailed any attempt to single out "only one country in the world, Israel, for censure and abuse" and suggestions that apartheid existed in Israel.

But the singling out of Israel for condemnation is also unacceptable to the EU and even if the Europeans did not follow Washington in abandoning Durban there is no chance any conference declaration could be approved in its present form, diplomats said.

"There is really very little difference between our view and the United States when it comes to the wording on Israel," one European diplomat told Reuters.

Belgian Foreign Minister Louis Michel, whose country holds the rotating presidency, said that the 15-state bloc had agreed to take part in the drafting of a "completely new text" on the Middle East.

An EU spokesman said the South Africans would take as their starting point in their search for a compromise over the Middle East a proposal put forward by Norway but which had previously been rejected by Islamic states.

The conference, which organisers hoped would be a landmark in the international struggle against racism, runs until September 7.

But from its outset it has been mired in rows over how to deal with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

There is also no accord in sight on African demands that former slave states make a formal apology for some 400 years of human trafficking up to the early 19th century during which some 12 million people where shipped in chains to the Americas.

- REUTERS

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