GAZA CITY, 17 July 2004 — Palestinian gunmen briefly abducted police chief Ghazi Jabali in a bid to highlight alleged corruption within the leadership yesterday, overshadowing the buildup to a UN General Assembly debate on Israel’s West Bank wall.
Jabali was freed after being held for about four hours in the Breij refugee camp, south of Gaza City, by militants from the Jenin Martyrs’ Brigades, who charged he was “one of the corrupt members in the Palestinian Authority.”
Witnesses said Jabali was driving in a three-car convoy along Gaza’s coastal highway when a group of men fired in his direction and abducted him. The kidnappers were heard shouting in Arabic twice: “We kidnapped Jabali”, before driving into the Breij refugee camp, they said.
Police later set up checkpoints along the highway where they stopped and searched every car. A source close to the Jenin Martyrs’ Brigades said its head Mahmud Nashabat had told Palestinian President Yasser Arafat in a telephone conversation that there was “a popular demand for reforms and to take those corrupt officials to justice.”
The militant group is an offshoot of the larger Popular Resistance Committees, whose members are mainly former activists of Arafat’s mainstream Fatah movement. Palestinian security sources said top officials had negotiated Jabali’s release with his abductors but gave no details of the agreement reached.
Witnesses said the head of the preventive security, Rashid Abu Shbak, and Fatah’s Gaza leader Ahmed Hillis were among the mediators who arrived in the camp to talk with the militants.
Meanwhile, Israel also declined yesterday to make a public apology demanded by Wellington after two members of the Jewish state’s Mossad intelligence agency were convicted of trying to fraudulently obtain a New Zealand passport. “We will not make public statements beyond those (made) on the subject by the foreign minister,” a spokesman for the ministry told AFP.
Foreign Minister Sylvan Shalom said Thursday he “regretted” that New Zealand suspended high-level contacts with Israel after the two alleged spies were sentenced to six years in prison. “Of course, we regret this response, but we think this decision is a decision that can be fixed,” Shalom said.
