Temple Mount Hearing Leaves Unanswered Questions in Killing of Arabs : Israel: A Jewish lawyer for one victim says, ‘Some witnesses were lying, some covering up for themselves or their friends.’

JERUSALEM —  The judge asked the police witness about a group of worshipers praying at Al Aqsa mosque during riots and police suppression there last October.

“No, I only saw blood,” the policeman responded, according to the account in the weekly newspaper Kol Hair that was confirmed by lawyers.

“Where?” asked the judge.

“On the floor.”

“Did this make an impression on you?”

“No. Why should it? Neat, groovy.”

The casual slang outraged the magistrate, Ezra Kama, who scolded the witness and told him to stick to relevant details.

It was one of the most heated moments in a five-month hearing that may prove to be the final word on last October’s killings of 20 Palestinians at Al Aqsa, in Jerusalem’s Old City. The witnesses’ testimony, finished last week, points to wild shooting by the police, incompetence and glaring oversights by investigators who probed the matter on behalf of the government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir.

The hearings took place in a tiny, gray arched courtroom in central Jerusalem as a proceeding required by law when deaths are caused by police. In this case, the hearing focused on the bloodshed of last Oct. 8--what the Jews refer to as the Temple Mount incident and Arabs call the massacre of Haram al Sharif. Muslims had gathered at the mosque to repel an expected effort by a nationalist Jewish group, known as the Temple Mount Faithful, to enter it.

Judge Kama is awaiting testimony from a government investigation before deciding whether to hand down indictments. He has heard more than 50 witnesses who gave 1,000 pages of testimony.

After the government investigation, which was completed in late October, one police officer in command was promoted, and no Israeli police officer was charged with a crime or negligence, although several Palestinians were sentenced to jail terms for throwing stones and attacking police.

According to the government report, 20 police officers were injured. Accounts at the time of the riot said that a half-dozen Jewish worshipers were lightly wounded by rocks. Besides the dead, about 150 Palestinians were wounded.

Several questions remain unanswered and will probably never be fully clarified. Police witnesses displayed gaps in memory about what they were doing during the incident. Lawyer Avigdor Feldman, who took part in the hearings on behalf of an Israeli Arab victim, considered the tangle of testimony part of a cover-up.

“Some witnesses were lying, some covering up for themselves or their friends,” he said.

Kol Hair, which reported extensively on the hearings, also used the word cover-up in analyzing some of the testimony.

Nonetheless, omissions in the official investigation, headed by a former intelligence chief, were brought to light and undermined the government’s efforts to close the book on the bloodiest day in the 3 1/2-year-old uprising against Israeli rule in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem.

The slayings provoked condemnation in the United Nations and, with the concurrence of the United States, a call for an investigation by a three-member U.N. team--which Israel refused to permit.

The Israeli government report said that shooting the Palestinians was justified because they had thrown stones onto the grounds of the Western Wall, where Jews were praying on a holiday morning. Most of the worshipers fled before the bulk of the stones rained down from the heights above the wall.

The lives of police were also said to be in danger, further justifying the bloodshed. At the time, a spokesman for Shamir said police “did a good job.”

Testimony gleaned from press reports and court documents suggests otherwise. Several police officers said they were blinded by their own tear gas and could not properly aim their rifles through the masks they were wearing. “I had the gas mask on my face,” a policeman recalled. “When you have a gas mask on, you try to aim through the sights, but it won’t be accurate.

“I can’t see. I had the gas mask on. I was sweating. You can’t look at the same person and see what happens to him.”

In an awkward explanation of how, by aiming at the legs of a rioter, a bullet might hit one in the head, another witness said, “It’s possible that (bullet) hit in the legs down below and from down below got to his head.”

Some testimony contradicted the official version, which asserted that in the initial outbreak of unrest, only tear gas and rubber bullets were used to fend off rioters. Instead, police said, live bullets and some automatic fire was used.

There was an account by an Arab witness of police firing on a crowd praying inside Al Aqsa mosque. “We sat down to pray, thinking they wouldn’t do anything to us,” the witness said. “We . . . were told to put up our hands. We did so, and they shot one of us, and he was killed. We fell to the ground and put our hands behind our necks.”

The witness described the police as “hysterical.”

One policeman reported that he saw a companion talking to a Palestinian and then turned around and saw that the policeman had shot the man, who fled “in pain.”

Another police witness said he was given orders by radio to open fire, suggesting that the firing orders were given even while police were not in danger. The officer also said he shot because “I felt my life was in danger.”

Lawyers for the Arab victims say that there are gaps in the testimony that appear to be unbridgeable. For example, they cite shooting that took place at the southern end of the compound in an area they describe as the “Bermuda Triangle” because no police officer seems to have fired into the area.

It is unclear who was in charge of troops at certain key moments. Jerusalem Police Chief Aryeh Bibi, who was promoted to an office job after the incident, arrived late and said that when he walked into the enclosure, shooting had stopped and everything was calm.

But police witnesses said Bibi ordered them to fire at the legs of rioters when they ran out of rubber bullets and tear gas, and the witnesses interpreted his order as meaning that it was all right to use lead bullets even if their lives were not in danger.

No one authorized the use of automatic fire, and one key witness, Border Police Cmdr. Shlomo Katabi, suggested that rifles might have been set on automatic by mistake. “This could be a response to pressure,” he surmised. “Could be the switch jumped into an automatic mode.”

Katabi described being attacked by waves of Palestinians who resisted being driven away. However, other officers described scenes of flight at the first police charge.

The spark that set off the riot remains unclear. Mohammed Jamal, a Muslim preacher in charge of the compound, claimed to see a border policeman toss a gas grenade to a colleague, which fell to the ground and exploded. The escaping gas ignited the crowd, which began to throw stones at police.

The police assertion that preachers urged the crowd to slaughter Jews was left unconfirmed. Videotapes of some of the turbulence record calls for worshipers to take refuge in the mosque and for police to stop shooting.

The government probe made no mention of a police group called the “Unit for the Restoration of Order,” which figured heavily in testimony about police violence. The government also glossed over the issues of firing orders and the use of automatic fire and decided that police shot to defend themselves--a conclusion challenged by some testimony in Kama’s court.

While Judge Kama was holding his hearings, a trial of nine accused Palestinian rioters took place in another courtroom. The judge, Miriam Bernstein, summarily dismissed charges that police were to blame. Bernstein said that the Palestinians confessed to throwing stones and assaulting police.

The Arabs agreed to a nine-month plea-bargaining sentence, which Bernstein considered unsuitable for their crime but accepted anyway. Bernstein added that the riot was well-planned and that the fear of the arrival of the Temple Mount Faithful to establish a temple on the site was only a “pretext” for violence.

The Temple Mount Faithful issued a leaflet last week pledging to go to the mosque grounds and hold a religious ceremony. The leaflet claimed that police had given them permission; but over the weekend, Police Minister Ronni Milo issued a denial and expressed dissatisfaction over the leaflet.

The Jewish group wants to expel the Muslims from Temple Mount, which was the main site of Jewish religious worship 2,000 years ago. The Faithful are campaigning to put up a Third Temple to succeed earlier structures. The October unrest was set in motion by an announcement that the group was going to lay a cornerstone for a new temple.

Muslims believe that the Prophet Mohammed ascended to heaven from the site. The Dome of the Rock, which marks the spot, was built by the Muslim caliph Abdel Malik 1,300 years ago after the capture of Jerusalem from Byzantium. Al Aqsa mosque was built a few decades later. In Arabic, Haram al Sharif means “Noble Sanctuary.”