Jewish Agency Says Britons Implemented Bomb Outrage

Wanganui Chronicle, 25 February 1948, Page 5

Jewish Agency Says Britons Implemented Bomb Outrage

NO OFFICIAL ARAB COMMENT (N.Z-. P. A.—Copyright.) Received 7.35 p.m. NEW YORK, Feb. 23 The Jewish Agency for Palestine, in New York today announced that it had received a cable from its Palestine headquarters declaring that a preliminary investigation into yesterday’s explosion in Jerusalem implicated British police and soldiers. The agency stated that the dynamiters arrived at the scene of the bombing in three army trucks and a police armoured car. These had come from the direction of Jaffa and on arrival on the outskirts of Jerusalem had been stopped and checked at a Haganah roadblock.

The cable said. “Roadblock guards testify that drivers of the trucks and occupants of the armoured car to whom they spoke, were English. This is also confirmed by eye-witnesses.”

“There seems little doubt that Britons took part in the outrage,” says the “New York Times” correspondent in Jerusalem, Sam Brewer, in a dispatch on the Benyehuda Street bombing. "There is no evidence that the British forces as such, however, were connected with it. The responsibility for the outrage is still not fixed.” Brewer quotes an unofficial Arab source as saying that Abdul Wadr Husseini, Arab military commander of the Jerusalem area, would make a statement for tomorrow’s Arab newspapers, saying that men under his command "including British and Polish volunteers,” carried out the attack

The “New York Times” devoted its main heading to attacks on Britons, but a sub-heading read: “Arab says British volunteers caused the outrage.” “The “Times”, in a later edition altered the sub-heading to read: "Arab says British, and Polish volunteers in his force aided in the bombing.” A dispatch which the “New York Herald Tribune” publishes from its Jerusalem correspondent, Fitzhugh Turner, under a main heading “Arab leader said to admit bomb attack,” contains no reference to Britons. Turner declared that Arab newspapers reported that they had received a communique from Husseini’s headquarters in a mountain village, north of Jerusalem, that a unit of Arab fighters carried out the bombing in retaliation for last week’s Jewish bombing of the market place in Arab Ramieh, where seven Arabs died.

Turner adds: “Other Arab sources said seven men took part in the operation, using stolen British uniforms and vehicles and 800 pounds of gelignite.”

leader, admits that it will not be easy to provide such a force and goints out that discussions due to egin today in the Security Council may well turn upon the decision of the United States, either to furnish or withhold effective aid. This decision, “The Times” says, is complicated by domestic considerations as well as by the unhappy differences among permanent members of the Council, but an international force must somehow be created before May 15 (when the British mandate expires) if Palestine is not to lapse into anarchy.”