'Bomb expert' seized on fishing boat off Israel

The Israeli navy arrested an alleged Hizbollah bomb-making expert on a fishing boat sailing down the coast from Lebanon to Gaza, a military spokesman said yesterday.

He said that marine commandos, who seized the vessel off the port of Haifa on Tuesday night, had found "suspicious objects and evidence of the transfer of knowhow and directives for carrying out terror attacks".

The suspect was identified as Hamad Abu Amra, an activist in the Lebanese Shia militia said to have been trained to infiltrate Gaza and work with Palestinian gunmen. Security sources said his cargo included CDs and videos on how to make more potent bombs, as well as sophisticated radio activators, fuses and detonators for Katyusha rockets.

The Israelis had tracked the boat from the time it sailed from Egypt to Beirut on 16 May with seven men on board. It was not, they explained, behaving like a normal fishing boat. At the weekend, they spotted a speedboat pull alongside and deliver the alleged Hizbollah man and his equipment. The commandos seized the boat off the Israeli port city of Haifa as it was sailing south.

Intelligence officers believe Mr Abu Amra was to have disembarked on the Egyptian coast and would then have been smuggled into the Gaza Strip. Last night Israel was trying to trace his alleged Palestinian partners. A Palestinian policeman, named as Fathi Razam, was suspected of being involved.

Hizbollah, which has continued to harass the Galilee border since Israel withdrew its troops from southern Lebanon three years ago, has given material and ideological support to the Palestinian intifada. It has particularly close ties with the radical Hamas and Islamic Jihad groups.

Israel maintains 24-hour patrols on its Mediterranean coastline. A year ago, the navy sank a Lebanese fishing boat said to have been carrying arms. All the crew were killed. Earlier, an weapons ship, the Santorini, was commandeered and escorted into port.

Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Prime Minister, met Hamas leaders in Gaza last night, in their first encounter since Mr Abbas took office last month. In his inaugural speech to the Palestinian parliament, he promised to disarm all the militias and stop attacks on Israeli civilians.

With his own authority still shaky and Yasser Arafat competing for control of the Palestinian security services, Mr Abbas is anxious to avoid an armed confrontation. He is trying to persuade the Islamists and dissidents in his own Fatah group to declare a ceasefire for 12 months so that Palestinians and Israelis can begin implementing the international "road-map" for a two-state solution.