Coerced Into Suicide Mission, Shia Muslim Says : Israelis Display Would-Be Bomber, 16

A 16-year-old Shia Muslim captured by Israeli soldiers said Sunday that he was coerced into trying to drive a suicide car bomb into an Israeli convoy in southern Lebanon.

Mohammed Berrou, in a news conference with Israeli reporters broadcast on Israel radio, said he was forced to accept the mission in order to get his father out of trouble. The news session marked the first time the Israelis have disclosed the capture of a would-be suicide bomber.

The youth was captured with a Mercedes-Benz laden with 880 pounds of explosives during a raid Feb. 23 on the village of Sir el Gharbiye northeast of the port city of Tyre.

Berrou told Israeli reporters that his father, a policeman, was in a traffic accident that injured the daughter of a prominent figure in Amal, the major Shia militia.

He said he was approached by an Amal leader known as Abu Hassan, who told him that his father would receive expensive medical treatment for his injuries and that the financial claim by the young woman’s family would be settled if Berrou undertook the mission. If he refused, Berrou said he was told, his family would suffer further.

Berrou said he had worked as a firefighter in Amal’s civil guard in Beirut. He said, though, that he had no contact with Islamic fundamentalists and no religious reason to launch the attack.

“No, I am not religious,” Berrou said on the radio in Arabic, which was translated into Hebrew. “I had no religious motives. . . . All that happened was that they repeated that I must go, I must go. So I went. That’s all.

“They told me that whoever carried out an act like this would enter paradise and become a saint. . . . What could I say? I told them OK.”

Berrou told his Israeli captors that before being recruited for the mission, he spent his spare time playing games in Beirut video arcades.

Anti-Israeli guerrillas have launched at least eight suicide bombing attempts against Israeli soldiers occupying southern Lebanon, including two in the past five weeks that killed 14 people. On Nov. 4, 1983, a truck bomb attack on an Israeli post near Tyre killed 60 people, including 28 Israelis.

Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin and other Israeli officials have linked the car bomb attacks to Shia religious fanaticism inspired by the Muslim fundamentalist rulers of Iran.

The broadcast quoted Berrou as saying instructors showed him how to drive the car in which the explosives would be loaded and told him that all he needed to do was crash into an Israeli convoy and set off the explosives with two switches.

“Turn the switch to the right and it works,” he said.

“They taught me more and more, just like they teach a small child how to speak. . . . They took me to Zrariye in south Lebanon with someone called Nur. There, they kissed me and hugged me and said, ‘Off you go; God will be with you.’ From there I continued with someone else called Malek to the village of Sir el Gharbiye, where I was caught.”

Berrou said Amal militiamen who sent him on his mission told him that he might survive the attack, since he would be wearing a flak jacket and there would be a heavy steel plate protecting him from the blast.