Bomber's mom: I didn't know
2005-02-26 18:05
Deir Al-Ghussun, West Bank - "Don't expect me home for dinner," Abdullah Badran told his mother, giving no other clue that he was about to blow himself up outside a Tel Aviv nightclub, killing four Israelis in the process.
Badran, 22, left the family home in Deir al-Ghussina in the northern West Bank at daybreak on Friday. Less than 24 hours later, Israeli soldiers stormed into the house to announce to his mother Sudqiyeh that her son was dead
"He told me as he was leaving the house not to wait for him at dinner time as he was going to eat at a friend's house," a tearful Sudqiyeh said.
Clutching a portrait of her son, the 54-year-old received a stream of condolence calls from the women of the village.
Other members of the family, given shelter by neighbours, had left the house for fear that it would be destroyed by the Israeli army as punishment, even though the military recently announced that it was ending the practice.
Security sources and villagers said Badran was a member of Islamic Jihad, although the leadership of the organisation has denied involvement.
"I did not know that he would commit any attack and if I had known I would have told him not to do it," Sudqiyeh said.
"There was nothing abnormal about his behaviour and the news came to us as a complete surprise," she added.
Badran had six brothers and three sisters, seven of whom lived in the family home with their parents.
Two brothers - Bilal, 30, and Mohammad, 23 - were arrested in the early hours of Saturday by the Israeli army. The troops also arrested two other villagers as well as questioning the imam of the local mosque.
Ezzedine Badran, a cousin of the bomber, said that Abdullah had been "close to Islamic Jihad" while adding that the Badran family as a whole were supporters of the mainstream Fatah movement of Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas.
"We are known as a family that supports Fatah, but Abdullah was close to Jihad," said the 42-year-old primary school teacher.
"The timing of the attack is very bad and does not serve the peace process," he added.
The bombing left a major dent in a ceasefire Abbas announced at a summit with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon earlier this month, seeking to draw a line under more than four years of bloodshed.
"We should respect the decisions of Fatah and the Palestinian Authority," said Badran in support of the ceasefire.
Abdullah Badran was not the first suicide bomber from the family.
His cousin, Rami Motlak, blew himself up at a cafe in the coastal town of Netanya in an attack that injured 30 people and was claimed by Jihad.
In Beirut, the Lebanese Shiite movement Hezbollah categorically denied on Saturday that it had anything do with the Tel Aviv bombing.
- AFP