JERUSALEM—The family of a Florida teenager who was killed in a Tel Aviv suicide bombing last year is asking the Israeli government to investigate reports that an Arab-Israeli prisoner came forward with information that could have prevented the attack.
Zechariah Shinkolevsky, an Israeli lawyer and the uncle of 16-year-old Daniel Wultz, is asking the Israeli government to take immediate steps to determine whether the bombing that killed his nephew could have been thwarted.
Wultz, who was from Weston, a Miami suburb, was one of 11 people who were killed last April in the only suicide bombing in Israel that claimed innocent lives last year. It was one of two suicide bombings last year in Israel; both targeted the same sandwich shop near the Tel Aviv bus station.
Army Radio reported this week that an Arab-Israeli prisoner had come forward a week before the bombing with a name of a bomber and the area he might attack, but that Israeli intelligence failed to act on the information.
Israel's Prison Service denied the report and said the unidentified prisoner had a history of providing tips that turned out to be false.
"The prisoner attempted during the years to distribute information concerning future terrorist attacks," said Orit Steltzer, a spokeswoman for the prison authority. "All of the information passed on by the prisoner was passed over to the security forces. The information was found to be false and the information didn't include real names or specific places."
Shinkolevsky declined to comment to McClatchy Newspapers about his complaint. But Israeli lawmaker Ophir Pines-Paz, the chairman of the Knesset Internal Affairs Committee, told Army Radio that he would look into the matter.
"If these claims turn out to be true, I will demand the establishment of an independent commission of inquiry to investigate this failure," he said.
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(c) 2007, McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
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