Israelis Fear More Violence From Extremists

The extremist conspiracy that claimed the life of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin is limited to no more than a dozen members, a senior Cabinet minister said Friday, but authorities fear that other right-wing Jewish groups may be preparing to use violence to scuttle Israel’s search for peace with its Arab neighbors.

Interior Minister Ehud Barak issued a sobering warning as a mourning nation went home at nightfall for Sabbath observances after one of the most traumatic weeks in its history.

“I don’t expect it to go beyond a certain group of six people, maybe a dozen. But no one can exclude the possibility of other underground groups that may try to repeat the scenario in the future,” Barak said in an interview with The Times.

A sixth young religious Jew was formally implicated Friday in the assassination of the 73-year-old prime minister last Saturday at a peace rally in Tel Aviv.

A judge in Tel Aviv ordered Michael Epstein, a 23-year-old engineering student, held for five days while an investigation continues. Police said Epstein knew of the assassination plan and also conspired to attack Arabs.

Appearing on Israeli television Friday night, Police Minister Moshe Shahal said in a joint statement with the Shin Bet secret service that Rabin’s murder was the work of an organized group that planned the assassination of Israeli officials, as well as attacks against Palestinian officials and civilians. He did not name the group, which he said had conspired for two years.

Yigal Amir, the 25-year-old law student who confessed to killing Rabin after being captured at the scene, has said he acted alone. But investigators have linked him to Eyal, a small, shadowy group of anti-Arab zealots.

Shahal said Amir planned and carried out the murder with help from his brother, Hagai, 27, and a friend, Dror Adani, 26, who lived in a Jewish settlement in the West Bank.

A larger number of militant young Israelis knew of the conspiracy to kill Rabin without participating in the actual planning, Shahal said on Friday’s national evening news.

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Yigal Amir told interrogators that he had stalked Rabin twice before with a loaded gun, both times coming “within eye-contact range” without finding the target to his liking.

Hagai Amir, who stockpiled explosives for the terrorists in his parents’ attic, also stalked Rabin, Shahal said.

Yigal Amir has told interrogators that in killing Rabin he followed the teaching of rabbis who ruled that the Israeli leader was a traitor who should die for surrendering Jewish land to Arabs, according to Shahal.

Meanwhile, with Jew-against-Jew violence as the disturbing backdrop, Israel and the Palestinians anticipated a new step in their complex and emotional ballet of exchanging land for peace.

Hundreds of Palestinian police from the Gaza Strip arrived in self-ruled Jericho on Friday, where they are preparing for the Palestinian Authority to assume control over the West Bank town of Janin on Monday after 28 years of Israeli control.

Israeli polls published Friday showed sharply higher support for Rabin’s peace policy. One newspaper sampling showed 74% in favor of the peace process, compared to 51% at the end of September.

And acting Prime Minister Shimon Peres, Rabin’s main partner in seeking peace with the Palestinians, would easily beat right-wing opponents if elections were held now, according to the poll in the centrist newspaper Yediot Aharonot, Israel’s largest.

Many Palestinians share Israelis’ grief at Rabin’s death, and Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat went to Tel Aviv late Thursday to pay a condolence visit to Rabin’s widow. But tensions run high; there are many discomfited extremists, both Arab and Jew.

Two Palestinians in a car on Friday shot at two Jewish settlers in another car near Nablus in the West Bank north of Jerusalem. One settler was slightly wounded, and Israeli police later arrested two Palestinians, Israeli radio said.

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In asking the judge in Tel Aviv to hold Epstein, a police prosecutor Friday termed the investigation “wide and dynamic. Every hour new facts are exposed and new names come up. The investigation is like an octopus, one of whose arms is Michael Epstein.”

Epstein met Yigal Amir at Sabbath get-togethers that Amir organized to support Jewish settlements in the West Bank, the police prosecutor said in court. Police asked that Epstein be held for 10 days; the judge agreed to five.

Under Israeli law, suspects must be charged or released at the end of the remand period. So far, police have said they intend to file murder charges against Yigal Amir and Adani, and lesser charges against the other four.

Although police have not said so officially, the group that linked the militants to one another is apparently Eyal. The group’s leader, Avishai Raviv, is one of the suspects. Yaron Kenner, a reporter who infiltrated the group, says he called Raviv the day after the assassination and asked if Yigal Amir “was one of ours.”

Raviv replied: “Yes, and he was very close to us too,” Kenner wrote in Friday’s edition of Yediot Aharonot. “I asked, ‘Did you know of his intentions?’ ‘No,’ said Raviv. ‘Nothing. I’m totally shocked. The guy just ruined his future. I knew that his views were more extreme than ours. I also knew he said that Rabin should be killed. But he never said that any more than we did. We all shouted all kinds of things at demonstrations.’ ”

Times staff writer Marjorie Miller in Jerusalem contributed to this report.