Israeli Police Capture Fugitive Kach Leader

Israeli police Sunday arrested the fugitive leader of the outlawed Jewish group Kach, ending a monthlong manhunt aimed at neutralizing the threat of extremist Jewish settlers and at blunting Palestinian outrage after last month’s massacre in a Hebron mosque.

But within hours of the arrest of Baruch Marzel, who heads the movement that spawned the Jewish settler who gunned down about 30 Palestinian worshipers Feb. 25, a settler leader warned that another massacre is possible if the government continues to make concessions to the Palestinians in the occupied territories.

“An atmosphere like this is what could push Jews to desperate and unconsidered acts,” declared Zvi Katzover, mayor of the Kiryat Arba settlement near Hebron in the West Bank that was home to Baruch Goldstein, a Brooklyn-born physician who fired more than 100 bullets at praying Palestinians inside the Cave of the Patriarchs.

Testifying before the Israeli panel investigating the massacre, which Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin has blamed on a lone “lunatic,” Katzover said, “I do not deny that there are crazies and lunatics in Kiryat Arba and the area.”

In related developments:

* Delegations from Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization reconvened Sunday in Cairo to push for a speedy agreement on Palestinian autonomy in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank town of Jericho before an April 13 deadline. Negotiators for both sides expressed optimism that agreement could be reached before the deadline.

* Rabin said in remarks broadcast Sunday that Israel will let exiled Palestinians return and will negotiate a prisoner release at the Cairo talks this week. Palestinians said 49 exiles will return, the Reuters news service reported. The PLO is demanding the release of an estimated 9,000 prisoners held by Israel. Rabin did not give a figure, but the Israeli newspaper Davar said several thousand will be freed in the coming weeks.

* Ten Palestinians and two Israeli soldiers were wounded in clashes in Hebron and Gaza on Sunday, Reuters reported.

In a pre-dawn raid Sunday, a police counterterrorism unit captured Kach leader Marzel inside a Jewish settlement near Kiryat Arba. Police traced him to the house of a fellow settler.

Marzel, 35, was unarmed, and he offered no resistance, according to police spokesman Eric Ben-Chen. Marzel, whose movement acknowledged that Goldstein was a member and proclaimed him a martyr after the massacre, had evaded the police--but not the media--during the weeks since the government ordered his detention.

During the month that Marzel appeared to move freely, granting newspaper and television interviews and appearing at pro-settler rallies near Hebron, many Palestinians were growing increasingly skeptical about the manhunt for the man who succeeded the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, who founded Kach in Brooklyn in 1971 and was assassinated there 20 years later.

Police said Marzel will be held without trial for three months along with the six other Jewish extremist leaders who were targeted for arrest by Rabin’s government under an anti-terrorism law that has been applied mostly to Palestinian radicals in the past.

Marzel was captured at the home of a settler who was arrested a year ago and is in jail and under trial for murder. Yoram Skolnik is charged with last year’s fatal shooting of a handcuffed Palestinian, who was in police custody for stabbing a Jew.

Skolnik’s father, interviewed on Israel Radio at his home in Jerusalem after Marzel’s arrest, said his son’s house was vacant and unlocked when Marzel entered.

“There is no problem to get into the house. . . . Obviously, somebody knew that the house would be empty,” Fred Skolnik said, insisting that his son had nothing to do with Kach.

Marzel’s arrest came amid other attempts Sunday to ease tension and speed the peace process between Israel and the PLO.

The Israeli and PLO delegations reconvened in Cairo hoping to beat the April 13 deadline--the date set last September for the end of Israel’s military withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and Jericho.

Israel has yet to begin withdrawing its troops, a process that was to start Dec. 13 under the September Israeli-PLO peace declaration. But a key member of Israel’s negotiating team, Environment Minister Yossi Sarid, said Sunday that he believes the two sides will agree before April 13 and that the troops could be out within a few days of a final agreement.

Israel’s chief delegate to the talks this week, Maj. Gen. Uzi Dayan, head of the Israeli army’s planning department, said initial discussions were also focusing on the early deployment of Palestinian police in the occupied territories.

Up to eight high-ranking Palestinian officers are scheduled to arrive in Gaza in the next few days to prepare for the initial deployment of several hundred Palestinian police, now trained and awaiting dispatch from Egypt and Jordan, beginning Thursday, PLO officials said.

Chief Palestinian negotiator Nabil Shaath shared Sarid’s optimism that they will meet the April 13 target date.

“We will do our best. This is an important date,” Shaath said. “We can do it if there are no major crimes against the Palestinians, and if there is the political will to do it on the part of the Israelis.”

But it was just such major crimes that Kiryat Arba’s Katzover predicted could well take place as he testified Sunday before the Shamgar Commission, the judicial body headed by Israeli Chief Supreme Court Justice Meir Shamgar.

The commission has already cast doubt on the official version of the massacre in its mission to determine how Goldstein fired three full magazine clips at Palestinian worshipers at the mosque.

Calling such massacres “acts of desperation,” Katzover, who publicly denounced Goldstein and the massacre, told the panel that Israeli concessions to the PLO, such as last week’s agreement to permit an armed international force to monitor Palestinian security in Hebron, sent signals to the city’s more than 100,000 Arabs that “Jewish blood has been abandoned.”

Times staff writer Kim Murphy contributed to this report from Cairo.