Olmert pledges more security for Jews after Mumbai attacks

             

Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert has said that his country would do everything necessary to protect Jewish centers across the world after nine Israelis were killed in assaults by Islamist militants in the Indian city of Mumbai. "The pictures of the Jewish victims, especially the scenes of those who ran the Chabad House, wrapped in prayer shawls, even as their blood-covered son was miraculously saved from the inferno, are shocking and take us back to events that we pray never recur," Olmert said at the weekly Cabinet meeting in Jerusalem on Sunday. "The hatred of Jews and the hatred of Israel and the hatred of Jewish symbols still continue to be a source fuelling these acts of murder." There was no doubt "that these attacks were designed, inter alia, to intentionally harm such Jewish institutions," Olmert said. Israeli Embassy officials in India said that they did not believe that Chabad House, a cultural center run by the Chabad Lubavitch movement where eight of the Israelis were killed, was targeted by accident.

Israeli media highlighted the case of Sandra Samuel, an Indian woman who worked as nanny for the toddler son of the murdered Chabad House director Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife Rivka, and who rescued him from the center after hiding from the militants for 12 hours. There were calls for her to be given leave to come to Israel indefinitely for her role in saving two-year-old Moshe. New York's mayor Michael Bloomberg praised the nanny's "heroic" rescue of the son and said that "during a time of terrible sadness, her courage reaffirms our faith in the capacity of good to triumph over evil."

More than 190 people are now known to have died in the attacks against several targets frequented by Westerners in India's commercial capital. Apart from Rabbi Hertzberg and his wife, other victims identified at the Chabad House include kosher supervisors Rabbi Leibish Teitelbaum, Bentzion Chroman, an Israeli from the town of Bat Yam, and Yocheved Orpaz, an Israeli who was in India to visit her daughter and grandchildren.

The only Mumbai terrorist caught alive told an Indian newspaper that he and his colleagues were sent to target Israelis. Azam Amir Kasab, a Pakistani, told Indian police that the terrorists targeted Nariman House, where the Chabad center was located, because it was frequented by Israelis, the 'Times of India' newspaper reported. Israelis were targeted to "avenge atrocities on Palestinians," the paper reported Kasab as saying. The Times also quoted a source as saying that some of the terrorists killed in the operation had earlier rented rooms at the Nariman House, identifying themselves as Malaysian students, in order to study the building.