Courier, 11, seen as pawn in Mideast terror

TEL AVIV -- Israeli military and intelligence analysts were reexamining unsolved terror bombing cases yesterday, after an 11-year-old boy was stopped at a checkpoint with a 20-pound, nail-reinforced bomb in a backpack. Israeli and Palestinian officials said the boy did not know what he was carrying.

Investigators said they were looking into whether this method could have been used in previous cases in which the route of bombs from their makers to their users was never discovered. The incident, the first time a child was found carrying a bomb unknowingly, seems likely to revive long-standing concerns on both sides about the willingness of Palestinian terrorists to involve children in their operations.

Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader of Hamas, has issued a religious ruling against the practice.

The boy was stopped Monday afternoon at the Hawara roadblock near Nablus, a major West Bank city where people exiting are checked especially stringently because of Nablus's reputation as a bomb-making center. The checkpoint was on high alert and had been reinforced following intelligence reports that the Tanzim, a wing of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's ruling Fatah movement, was attempting to move a bomb out of the city.

But no one expected to find the bomb in the backpack of Abdullah Quran, 11, a resident of the nearby Balata refugee camp and one of the handful of boys who earn a few dollars after school carrying packages back and forth across the checkpoint for Palestinian civilians being checked by Israeli soldiers. Sometimes, they ferry packages from people who are not allowed to leave Nablus to recipients on the other side of the crossing.

"He had three bags," said Moran Bokent, 19, a military police officer for Beersheba who is assigned to monitor the checkpoint. "Since I couldn't see what was in his backpack, I took it from him" to put on the examining table.

"It was very heavy," she said. "I opened it and saw on top a box with wires coming out and a plate with metal balls on it. . . . That's when I called the lieutenant, who called in the bomb squad."

The bomb squad safely detonated the device, but only after those who gave the boy the bag tried and failed to detonate it by remote control while Bokent, Quran, and other soldiers and civilians were nearby.

"The kid had no idea what was going on. He didn't know he had a bomb strapped on," Bokent said. "He was as surprised as the rest of us."

Israeli and Palestinian security officers said the boy told them a man approached him on the Nablus side of the checkpoint and asked him to take the backpack to someone who would be waiting on the other side to receive it. One of them allegedly paid him five shekels -- a little more than $1.

Government spokeswoman Miri Eisen, a former Israeli army intelligence analyst, said the call register on the cellphone that was wired to the bomb showed an incoming call shortly after Bokent stopped the boy.

"We think this was a fallback position," to detonate the bomb at the checkpoint if the boy was searched, she said. "What they really wanted was for him to get through," hand off the package, "and have the bomb used in central Israel. They were watching from afar. They were perfectly willing to kill the kid."

Israeli officials said the boy was questioned briefly and released. The newspaper Ma'ariv reported that the boy's mother says he was detained for a protracted period and beaten by the soldiers. She told a Palestinian reporter she did not believe her son had been given a bomb by a Muslim because "our religion does not allow using children for such an attack."

B'Tselem, a leading Israel-based human rights group that includes both Jewish and Muslim activists and often is strongly critical of Israeli treatment of Palestinians, said in a prepared statement that "there is no possible justification for attacks targeting civilians . . . [and that] taking advantage of Abdullah Quran, age 11, only compounds the violation. Using a child to transport explosives is in and of itself a war crime."

Lieutenant Colonel Guy Hazut, the commander of the area, said, "Anyone who says that the roadblocks provide no security and only humiliate the Palestinians received proof today just how wrong he is."

While the incident is the first known case of an unknowing child being used to carry a bomb into an Israeli position, numerous attacks using bombs or other weapons have been mounted using children who participated knowingly. The operations frequently result only in the death of the children carrying the explosives.

Gideon Meir, deputy director of Israel's Foreign Ministry, said the incident showed that Palestinian terrorists "are willing to kill their own children in order to kill as many Israelis as possible. They have no God except for blood and more blood."

If the bomb had exploded, Meir said, "the media would have reported it as an 11-year-old suicide bomber, but it wouldn't have been."

Bomb makers based in Nablus have attempted on at least two other occasions to smuggle bombs out of the city under cover of unknowing civilians, Eisen said. In those cases, she said, "real polite, innocent people who had no idea there were suicide belts underneath them" were being transported in Red Crescent ambulances containing the explosives.

Israeli media reported last night that another bomb, about the same size as the one Quran was found to be carrying, was discovered hidden in a Palestinian man's truck at the same checkpoint yesterday. It is so far unclear whether the driver knew that it was there.

Charles A. Radin can be reached at radin@globe.com.