Rabin Murdered in Plot Against Peace, Israeli Police Say : Mideast: Jewish extremists targeted other politicians, officials say. Cache of explosives is found at home of confessed assassin. Two more suspects are arrested.

Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was murdered in a plot by Jewish extremists who planned the assassination of other pro-peace politicians and stockpiled explosives, Israeli police said Thursday.

“We believe there was a conspiracy,” Police Minister Moshe Shahal said.

Two more right-wing Israelis in their 20s were remanded to face charges, raising the number of alleged plotters in jail to five.

More arrests are possible, Shahal said. At least one more man, a rabbinical student, is under interrogation in what authorities are portraying as a plot to sabotage Israel’s search for peace with its Arab neighbors.

Investigators found grenades, cases of explosives, timers and a pistol silencer at the home of Rabin’s confessed assassin, Yigal Amir. Police said the armory, stashed in the attic of the family’s house where Amir’s mother runs a nursery school, and in the back yard, where the children played, would “make any terror group happy.”

Arrested at a peace rally seconds after he shot Rabin point-blank, Amir, a 25-year-old law student, claimed he acted alone. Police have made clear they do not believe him.

“He couldn’t have done it himself. He needed technical infrastructure and support from others,” Shahal told reporters Thursday. Cabinet ministers and other political figures were among the conspirators’ targets, Shahal said.

“This is bigger than we thought,” one senior government official said privately. “These people were very serious, well determined, not amateurs.” He said the conspirators had tried “several times” to get close enough to Rabin to kill him.

Also on Thursday, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, making his first known visit to Israel since he became chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, paid a condolence call on Leah Rabin, the slain premier’s widow, late in the evening at her Tel Aviv home. An aide to Arafat said he had flown to Tel Aviv and spent 90 minutes in the Rabin home along with two other PLO officials.

“It is our duty, because you know during the funeral I hadn’t the ability to participate for security matters,” Arafat said after returning home to the Gaza Strip, which his Palestinian Authority rules as a result of a 1993 peace accord with the Rabin government.

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Israeli officials had asked Arafat not to attend Rabin’s funeral in Jerusalem on Monday, saying they feared for the Palestinian leader’s safety.

Asked what he said to Leah Rabin, Arafat told Reuters news agency: “That we lost a great man who made the peace of the brave with us. He was our partner, and we thank you for continuing his road and his march.”

Arafat said Leah Rabin told him that “she and the Israeli people are insisting to carry on the peace process.”

Israel Radio quoted Rabin’s widow as saying to Arafat: “My husband regarded you as his partner in peace.”

Earlier in the day, magistrates in Tel Aviv heard evidence against two accused plotters in the Rabin assassination--both friends of Amir--amid hardening popular reaction against Israeli rightists who opposed Rabin’s drive to swap land for peace with neighboring Arab countries.

The opposition Likud Party reported death threats against its leader and damage to two party offices. Vandals defaced the grave of an assassinated rabbi whose extremist teachings are cherished by anti-Arab Jews.

Acting Prime Minister Shimon Peres promised in a phone call to Arafat on Thursday that the peace process would continue, but the killing of Rabin has crystallized and deepened angry divisions among Israelis so long united by the threat from foreign enemies.

For the first time Thursday, bodyguards ran, American-style, alongside Peres’ limousine as it moved through Jerusalem streets.

Slight, black-bearded and bespectacled Dror Adani shuffled into court between two police guards Thursday to hear himself accused of murder and conspiracy.

The 26-year-old rabbinical student from a West Bank settlement rocked back and forth as if in prayer while police investigator Nissim Daoudi presented charges against him.

Evidence would prove that Adani was “part of a group that planned and carried out the murder of the prime minister,” the investigator said.

Adani ridiculed the accusation, saying he had met Amir in the army and became reacquainted with him about six months ago after learning that Amir was organizing weekend support groups for Jewish settlements in Israeli-occupied Arab territories.

“He would call me every now and then. He wanted me to meet his sister,” Adani said, according to the court transcript. “He invited me to his house on Friday evenings so I should talk to her and get to know her. I came two or three times to see if anything would come of it, and that’s it.”

After reviewing two exhibits of sealed police evidence in closed courts, the judge granted a 15-day remand.

The group that Adani allegedly worked with was not named in court, but on Wednesday police charged Avishai Raviv, 28-year-old leader of an extremist anti-Arab group called Eyal. Amir, whose 27-year-old brother Hagai is in jail for allegedly altering the bullets used in the killing, was close to Eyal, although police have not publicly asserted his membership.

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Eyal, a tiny group known for its hatred of Arabs, was thought to be more mouth than fist. But Israeli television Thursday reported that Eyal had links to two other extremist groups, including the outlawed organization Kach.

Also accused by police at Thursday’s hearing was 23-year-old Amir friend and classmate Ohad Skornick of Tel Aviv, a surgeon’s son. Skornick, who was on his honeymoon the night of the assassination, is accused of having failed to prevent the slaying.

Police say he is “at the core” of the conspirators’ group. After the killing, Skornick twice voluntarily appeared for questioning at police request, his lawyer told the judge in asking for his release.

“He walked around the university [Bar Ilan in Tel Aviv] and was told that a third of the university students knew that the suspected killer had plans to kill,” the lawyer said. The judge ordered Skornick held for five days.

Amir, who said he had stalked Rabin twice before, told police that he killed the 73-year-old prime minister as a sacred duty. He shows no remorse, police said, but his family’s anguish gripped a nation Thursday night.

While his father, Shlomo, a Bible scribe, sat stonily by, as if catatonic with shock, the assassin’s mother, Geula Amir, told Israeli television: “My heart is crying. My heart will cry many more years. It will go crying to my grave.”

She said she could not believe it when police found explosives in the attic.

“Shlomo and I stood there stunned, simply in shock. When I went upstairs . . . , I asked [the police], ‘What are those bars of soap?” When they explained it to me, it took me perhaps an hour or two to digest what he’d left up there,” she said.

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In tragedy’s aftermath the peace process limped along, with Israeli and Palestinian delegates meeting Thursday to work out timing for the transfer on Monday of the West Bank town of Janin to Palestinian control.

Conservative rabbis met to explore whether their bitter opposition to the surrender of territory had contributed to the internal fractures that led to the assassination.

Rabbis in about 7,000 synagogues have been asked, as the Sabbath falls over Israel tonight, to urge national recommitment to the commandment “Thou shalt not kill.”

Passions ride close to the surface, however. Police asked that a 44-year-old settler from Shani, David Belahsan, who expressed sympathy for the killer in an interview with a foreign TV reporter, be held in custody. And an Israeli worker, Yaacov Avraham, was fired from Kitan factory in Beit Shean for holding a party in honor of the assassin.

Yitzhak Newman, an American freshman at Bar Ilan University, faced suspension after posting this message on an electronic bulletin board: “Happy holiday everyone. The witch is dead; the wicked witch is dead.”

“The right has murdered again,” read one piece of Tel Aviv graffiti. A caller to the offices of the right-wing Likud Party said, “Get a coffin for Bibi. Netanyahu is next. We will kill him.”

Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu, the party leader, has rejected charges that his rhetoric helped create a climate of violence against Rabin.

“The invective against us does not come from the lowest of the low, from the dregs. It comes from government ministers,” he complained.

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In Jerusalem, vandals poured white paint on the grave of the American anti-Arab rabbi Meir Kahane. Binyamin Kahane, son of the rabbi--who was slain in New York five years ago--was in court Thursday requesting permission to hold a public memorial service in Jerusalem on Sunday.

Asked his reaction to Rabin’s death, Kahane replied: “I don’t think nothing about it. I don’t have no feelings.”

Cautious, the court refused Kahane’s request. A public memorial for Rabin is scheduled that day in Tel Aviv in the square where he was killed.