Israel spy agency tried to recruit alleged killer

JERUSALEM (AFP) – A Jewish settler who was arrested for allegedly having murdered two Palestinians was approached by Israel's internal security agency to be an informer after the attacks, the agency said Friday.

Jack Teitel, a 37-year-old immigrant from the United States, was arrested in October on suspicions of murdering the men in 1997 while visiting Israel as a tourist, the police announced on Sunday. He is also suspected of being behind a string of bomb attacks since 2006.

When Teitel returned to Israel in 2000, three years after the murders, he was questioned by the Shin Bet internal security service and the police over the killings, but no charges were filed.

It was at that moment that the domestic intelligence agency asked him to serve as its informant in extreme right-wing circles, according to the mass-selling Yediot Aharonot newspaper, which broke the story.

The agency confirmed it had tried to recruit Teitel after the 2000 interrogation, saying in a statement that it "had but a limited number of interviews with him, without result. The contacts were then cut."

Dubbed the "Jewish terrorist" by the Israeli press, police said Teitel has confessed to the murder of a Palestinian taxi-driver in east Jerusalem and a shepherd in the West Bank, saying the killings were to avenge Palestinian suicide bombings in Israel.

Teitel is also alleged to have placed a bomb near a convent outside Beit Shemesh, west of Jerusalem, two year ago, wounding a Palestinian.

In another bomb attack, a 15-year-old boy was seriously wounded when a device was concealed in a parcel sent to his parents, members of a Jewish sect which embraces Jesus.

Another bomb wounded a leading left-wing Israeli professor, Zeev Sternhell, while two other attacks targeted police stations, police said.

The father of four is a resident of the Shvut Rachel settlement in the occupied West Bank.