Modesto Bee · 29 May 1990

CP-1990-028

Bomb explodes in Jerusalem market

By ALFONSO CHARDY, Knight-Ridder Newspapers

Scan 860 × 318 pixels

Transcribed from the clipping

JERUSALEM — A bomb exploded at lunch time Monday in the principal Jewish market in downtown Jerusalem killing one person and wounding at least nine others. Within minutes of the blast at the market in the Mahane Yehuda neighborhood, Israeli shoppers spontaneously attacked journalists covering the event and Arab workers at the scene.

One journalist, a photographer, was hospitalized, Israeli Radio said. Many Israelis dislike the press, blaming it for Israel’s battered international image. Coming eight days after an Israeli gunman killed seven Palestinians in the Tel Aviv suburb of Rishon Lezion, many Israelis automatically perceived the Mahane Yehuda blast as Arab revenge for Rishon Lezion.

But senior police officials said they had no idea who planted the bomb or for what purpose. Reuters news agency said a caller in the Syrian capital of Damascus claimed responsibility for the blast on behalf of a group called Fatah Uprising. The caller said a group operative planted a bomb on a bus and timed it to go off as the vehicle passed the market.

However, Israeli police said the bomb was concealed in a plastic bag placed inside a trash bin between a food stall and a restaurant. In Arab East Jerusalem, Palestinian political leader Faisal Husseini condemned the bomb attack. “I absolutely reject attacks against civilians,” Husseini said.

The place where the bomb exploded is an old-style market of colorful stalls selling fruit and vegetables in the heart of downtown Jewish Jerusalem. Located off Jaffa Road, the principal business thoroughfare in downtown Jerusalem, the market is the main attraction in Mahane Yehuda, a neighborhood chiefly populated by Jewish immigrants from Arab countries.

Politically conservative, Mahane Yehuda is fervently anti-Palestinian and consistently supportive of Israel’s most hard-line political figures.

How this transcription was made

Read from the scan by a machine looking at the image of the page, not by optical character recognition and not by a person. The clipping carries no masthead or date line, so its date and newspaper rest on the record it arrived with, not on anything visible in the scan.

Context added by this archive

Date check: No masthead and no page date line on the clipping — it is cut to the one-line headline, the byline block and four text columns, with no folio and no paper name. “Modesto Bee” appears nowhere on the scan; the only credit is “Knight-Ridder Newspapers”, the syndicate, not the paper.

The story is datelined JERUSALEM with no date and reports a bomb “at lunch time Monday” coming “eight days after” the Rishon Lezion killings, which is consistent with a Tuesday paper of 29 May 1990, but the page itself does not say so.

Cite this clipping

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