Bus on Jaffa Road Read online

  Although it was closer to the bomb site than Hadassah Ein Kerem, Shaare Zedek Medical Center did not have the advanced trauma ward that Hadassah had at that time. Sofer knew that. But he also knew that Leah Mousa’s life was slipping away. Thinking quickly, he reasoned that if doctors at Shaare Zedek could stabilize Mousa, maybe she could be moved to Hadassah at a later time.

  Sofer had radioed ahead, and a team of doctors and nurses ran to the ambulance as it rolled up the driveway to Shaare Zedek’s emergency room doors. Sofer got out, reached for Mousa’s stretcher as the nurses and doctors lifted it from the ambulance, then backed away and watched them rush her through the hospital doors.

  Only thirty minutes before, he had left morning prayers at his yeshiva. Now, as the emergency room doors closed, Sofer wondered if the woman he had accidentally found on the sidewalk would live or die. He wanted to stay and take care of Mousa. But he knew others at the hospital would do that. He had been trained to not get too emotionally involved with patients. Otherwise he would not be able to focus his attention and energy on other bomb victims. So he slipped into the passenger seat of the ambulance and told the driver to go back to Jaffa Road. Still, he made a mental note to himself to return and check on the woman he had found on the sidewalk.

  Koby Zrihen worked his police radio as he sped through Jerusalem’s streets, summoning a team of fellow police detectives to the Jaffa Road bomb scene as quickly as possible. Being a police detective in Jerusalem is unlike an investigator’s job in most other big cities. In New York City, London, and Paris, police detectives handle all manner of crimes, from murders to street muggings to break-ins and thefts. Their job is to collect evidence and trace the whereabouts of the criminals. In Jerusalem, Zrihen was well schooled in the art of collecting evidence and tracking down crooks. He knew how to assess fingerprints, how to analyze even the smallest pieces of evidence, how to interview witnesses and suspects. But what made him different was that the primary focus of most of his investigative work was chasing suspected terrorists.

  He parked his car near the intersection of Jaffa Road and Sarei Yisrael Street. Several ambulances had already arrived and medics were carrying away wounded. Zrihen walked slowly toward the blackened skeleton of the bus, his eyes combing the scene.

  The bodies of the dead—or pieces of the bodies—seemed everywhere, scattered across the street or piled atop one another in the bus. The wail of sirens from fire trucks and more ambulances grew louder, and Zrihen found himself looking down to avoid stepping on severed fingers, hands, and feet. Along the sidewalks, people gathered in small knots, some of them crying now.

  His job was not to rescue the wounded or pick up the dead. Zrihen had to quickly figure out if there was any evidence amid this carnage that might offer a clue to where the bomb came from and who set it off. Years before, he had commanded a platoon of tanks in the Israeli army. In his police work, he still relied on some of the skills he learned in the military—about how to quickly assess a battlefield and find the signs that were important amid those that were not. And yet, he could not ignore the fact that this was no ordinary battlefield. Yes, a bomb had exploded. And yes, an orange fireball had swept through a bus, killing many in the same gruesome way he had seen men die in combat. But these were his fellow citizens—and most were civilians.

  “You are finding yourself doing something no human being wants to deal with,” Zrihen rcalled. “You mind is empty and kind of full.”

  He noticed the smell of death, faint at first, then stronger as he walked closer to the bus skeleton. He knew this smell from previous bombings. It was somewhat sweet but it was also laced with the unmistakable tinge of fire.

  Zrihen tried to ignore the crying of the onlookers, the gruesome array of bodies and severed limbs, the smell. His mind raced. How would he find any clues to the bomber amid this chaos?

  He watched as his investigators organized themselves into search teams. Several walked southward on Jaffa Road, in the same direction the bus had come. Others climbed through the bus. Still others searched the asphalt immediately adjacent to the bus.

  The street was covered with paper—from soldiers’ duffel bags, from students’ backpacks, from women’s purses and men’s briefcases. Each piece had to be searched. Then, the detectives had to examine the bodies themselves and the body parts. Did any of these pieces of paper offer a clue to the identity of the bomber? Zrihen hoped they would.

  When a bomb explodes, it leaves all sorts of clues, especially on the bodies of the dead who are close enough to the bomb to absorb the brunt of the explosion. Zrihen was especially interested in bodies—or parts of bodies—that were charred the most. They were probably closest to the blast. Maybe there was a clue there.

  It had been almost thirty minutes since Zrihen drove up to the bomb scene. The wounded had been removed within the first twenty minutes. Now the bus and nearby streets were swarming with dozens of people—medics still checking on the dead, Shin Bet agents, journalists, firefighters, cops, soldiers, and members of the Zihuy Korbanot Ason (ZAKA), which have one of the world’s most unusual jobs: wiping up blood and picking up body parts so they can be properly prepared for burial. While the instincts of the first-responders and others were well intentioned, Zrihen also knew that the onslaught of people on a crime scene often contaminates evidence or, in some cases, destroys it. Unlike in the United States, where police and the FBI typically seal off a crime scene and sometimes wait hours to even remove the dead or clean up the body parts so that investigators can meticulously search for evidence, Israeli crime scenes tend to be far more chaotic and are wiped clean within hours.

  The level of chaos had continued to rise. A doctor at Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital called a medic on the scene. One of the victims of the bus explosion had lost an ear in the blast. The doctor felt he might be able to reattach the ear to the wounded man at the hospital. But he needed to have the ear. Could the medics search the bomb scene for an ear? And, if they found one, could they drive it to the hospital? Within minutes, medics found an ear. They packed it in ice inside a cooler then two other medics drove the cooler to Hadassah Hospital.

  It was the kind of story that underscores the courage and dedication of Israeli’s ambulance service, not to mention the unique care and surgical expertise of trauma doctors and staff at Hadassah Hospital. For a meticulous cop like Koby Zrihen, however, it was the kind of intrusion that might disrupt a crime scene and perhaps damage much-needed evidence.

  Zrihen studied the bus floor. He knew from past experience that a suicide bomber often detonates a bomb in two ways—by picking up a bomb-laden bag and holding it to his chest or by simply leaving it on the bus floor and pressing a button. If the bomb exploded on the bus floor, Zrihen knew there would be a hole.

  He scanned the entire bus, under the seats—or what was left of them—and especially in the back where most of the passengers had died.

  No holes in the floor.

  Zrihen made a quick mental calculation. He looked down Jaffa Road. About one hundred feet away, investigators had found the charred head of a young man with a thin face. The head appeared to have been violently ripped from its body. Was this young man close to the explosion? Also, while the face had been badly burned, investigators thought it had features that were typical of Palestinians. Zrihen’s investigators took a DNA sample from the head, which might help identify the man.

  Then came another clue. Near the bus, Zrihen’s investigators found an ID card for a nineteen-year-old Palestinian from the al-Fawwar refugee camp near Hebron, almost thirty miles away. The name on the card did not offer any immediate clue—Majdi Abu Wardeh. But Zrihen wondered nonetheless why a nineteen-year-old Palestinian man would be so far from his home and taking a bus on Jaffa Road at 6:45 a.m. on a Sunday. And was this the ID card for the young man whose head had been found minutes earlier?

  Ami Ayalon, the new Shin Bet chief, was now on the scene. He, too, thought tha
t the badly burned head and the ID card of the nineteen-year-old Palestinian man from the West Bank refugee camp might be important clues. Shin Bet’s Jerusalem chief, Yisrael Hasson agreed. Shin Bet agents knew the West Bank well and were familiar with the al-­Fawwar camp where the young man was from.

  In recent months, however, Shin Bet had deliberately scaled back its West Bank monitoring, deferring and trusting instead the newly formed Palestinian security police under Yasser Arafat. The new relationship had been uneasy and rocky. The Shin Bet mistrusted Arafat—and many of his close advisors. Far too many Palestinian security officers had been former guerrilla fighters. Shin Bet feared that far too many still kept close ties to Hamas and Islamic Jihad. But the Oslo Peace process essentially set up a system of self-governance in the Palestinian terrorities. That self-governance meant the Palestinians would handle police matters—most of them, anyway. On this day, as Ami Ayalon and Yisrael Hasson walked through the rubble at the Jaffa Road bomb scene, both knew that Shin Bet had to take an active role in checking on the identity of the nineteen-year-old man from the al-Fawwar camp.

  Maybe it was a coincidence that this young man happened to be on the Number 18 bus. Then again, maybe this was the clue that Shin Bet needed to track down the origins of this bomb plot. Perhaps the young man’s parents could shed light on why he had come to Jerusalem so early on this Sunday and why he had taken a bus. Ayalon and Hasson dispatched several agents to al-Fawwar. Besides talking to the parents, the agents were told to obtain DNA samples from the parents.

  The ambulance with David Sofer in the passenger seat rolled up to the intersection of Jaffa Road and Sarei Yisrael Street. With a siren blaring and lights flashing atop the ambulance, Sofer was able to return to the bomb scene in less than ten minutes after leaving Leah Mousa at Shaare Zedek Medical Center. As the ambulance stopped, Sofer got out and walked toward the blackened wreckage.

  More paramedics had arrived. So had more police and Shin Bet agents. Two police officers with bomb-sniffing dogs stood in the middle of the intersection of Sarei Yisrael Street and Jaffa Road, waiting to see if they were needed to search for other explosives. One of the dogs—a brown, mixed breed—was lying on the asphalt. Nearby, three men chatted by the back door of a white ambulance van. Four other men leaned against the side of the van—all apparently waiting for instructions.

  Sofer looked at the bus. Crews of crime scene analysts and paramedics were still trying to remove the dead, some of whom were still upright in their seats, their heads slumped forward or to one side. Sofer knew the body count would be high.

  Just after 7:30 a.m., police radios jumped to life with a new, ominous report: Another terrorist bomb had exploded—this one, at a bus stop thirty miles away, in Ashkelon, where several dozen soldiers were waiting. The bomber, a Palestinian man who died in the explosion, was dressed as a soldier.

  Here, amid the carnage on Jaffa Road, Sofer tried to ignore the news that another bombing had taken place. Other medics would surely respond to that explosion and tend to the wounded and dead. For now, he had more work to do.

  Sofer stepped into the bus again. Its floor was littered with the scraps of daily life—purses, backpacks, papers, books, eyeglasses, hats, shoes. Men from the ZAKA organization were now quietly walking from seat to seat, searching for body parts and wiping up bits of flesh and small pools of blood. Sofer inched toward the back seats, where some dead passengers were still in their seats.

  Medics picked up the bodies of several dead soldiers. Sofer noticed a name tag on a young soldier’s uniform: “Yonatan Barnea,” the son of the prominent Israeli newspaper columnist. Sofer wondered if Nahum Barnea knew about his son yet. He turned and looked to another seat, and a young woman. Medics had not removed her body.

  Sofer hesitated, struck by how young and beautiful she seemed. He leaned forward and picked her up, then turned to carry her off the bus. As he stepped off the bus, Sofer wondered about the woman and where she came from—what drew her to this bus on this morning.

  “She is someone’s daughter,” Sofer thought as he walked with the woman’s body to a waiting ambulance. “She must have a family somewhere.”

  Chapter 3

  Ten hours after the fireball ripped apart the Number 18 bus on Jaffa Road, a telephone rang almost 6,000 miles away in the second-floor bedroom of a colonial-style house on a tree-lined street in the New York City suburb of Teaneck, New Jersey. It was almost ten o’clock, Sunday morning, February 25, 1996. Arline Duker had slept longer than usual and was making her bed as she reached for the receiver and heard a woman’s voice—Kathleen Riley, the United States Consul in Jerusalem.

  “Is this Arline Duker?” Riley asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you the mother of Sara Duker?”

  “Yes.”

  “And she’s in Israel?”

  “Yes . . .”

  Arline had been out late the night before at a party at a synagogue on the other side of town to celebrate the bar mitzvah of a friend’s son. Around 11:30 p.m., she found herself at a table with several friends, exchanging news about their children—especially Sara. Nine months before, Sara had arrived for Sabbath services at the synagogue with her boyfriend, Matthew Eisenfeld, and the sight of such a vibrant couple so obviously in love inevitably sparked all manner of speculation of whether a wedding was in the near future.

  As her friends listened, Arline explained that Sara was in Jerusalem where Matthew was also pursuing his rabbinical studies. Then she glanced at her watch. It was seven hours later in Jerusalem—around 6:30 on Sunday morning there. Arline realized she had not spoken to Sara on the telephone in two weeks. For a moment, she wondered if she should rush home and call her daughter. Then, Arline thought better of it. Sara would probably want to sleep late. With the bar mitzvah party winding down, Arline wanted to get to bed, too. There would be plenty of time on Sunday afternoon to call Sara.

  Arline, of course, had no idea that as she spoke to her friends at the bar mitzvah party that Sara was walking from her apartment with Matthew to catch the Number 18 bus and embark on a short vacation to Jordan. As midnight approached and she continued chatting with the friends, Arline felt a sense of motherly pride at how well her family seemed to be doing.

  It had not been an easy path for her. A dozen years before, Arline lost her husband, Ben-Zion, to brain cancer. The two had met in the early 1970s when Arline was enrolled in graduate courses at Columbia University’s Teachers College. When he died in October 1984, Ben-Zion was just forty-two. Arline was thirty-nine, with three daughters to raise.

  Ariella, the youngest, was only three at the time of her father’s death, and Arline’s middle daughter, Tamara, had just turned eight. Sara, the oldest at eleven years, had been especially close to her father. As Arline liked to say later, Ben-Zion taught Sara to read, and, in conversations on their father-daughter walks to the synagogue on Saturday mornings, he passed on a love of Judaism to his daughter that seemed to become a permanent part of her personality.

  After Ben-Zion died, Arline noticed that Sara threw herself into her schoolwork with a deeper sense of seriousness. Sara still maintained a girlish sense of serendipity, mostly evident in her penchant for flowery skirts and purple sneakers, but, as even some of her friends noticed, she seemed driven to build a strong and independent life for herself. Now twenty-two years old and a graduate of Arline’s alma mater, Barnard College at Columbia University, Sara seemed to have reached a new and stable plateau.

  Arline often marveled at how Sara seemed equipped with a seriousness that she balanced with a deep sensitivity to those around her. In some ways, Sara seemed far older than she was and was already making strides to support herself, establish a career, and perhaps marry and have a family. Arline felt a sense of accomplishment—and, at times, quiet relief—at the steady path that Sara seemed to have forged. While in Jerusalem only a few months, Sara had not only found a full-time job at
the Hebrew University biology lab, but also had organized an environmental group and was planning a campaign to improve the city’s slipshod methods of recycling plastic and other trash. Arline also was proud of how her daughter had embraced her place in Judaism, trying, like many young Jewish women in the mid-1990s, to balance her faith’s traditions with modern women’s roles in work and at home. “I was always amazed at how much she managed to get done,” Arline said years later.

  In some ways, Arline could have been talking about herself. After her husband died, Arline left her teaching career and returned to graduate school for a degree in social work. She enjoyed the challenge and pace of teaching, first in the New York City public schools then later in several Jewish private schools. But her husband’s death had given Arline a new appreciation of the needs of grief-stricken people—and how important a sensitive, attentive counselor could be. She embarked on a new path as a therapist, first with a Bergen County government agency, then with her own counseling practice not far from her home.

  Now, on this Sunday morning, Arline found herself in a somewhat odd predicament after so many years of raising three daughters. The house was quiet and she was alone. Tamara, now twenty, had also left for studies in Israel, at a university in the southern Israeli city of Beersheba. Arline’s youngest, fourteen-year-old Ariella, had spent the night at a sleepover party at a friend’s house.

  In the preceding days, a much-welcomed thaw broke through the frigid winter chill that had enveloped the New York City region for months. Forecasters even predicted that temperatures in the region might reach sixty degrees that day. But any notion that Arline might have a relaxing day ahead, with perhaps a quiet walk in a park or a leisurely breakfast, evaporated when she answered her bedroom phone.

  From her office at the US Consulate on Nablus Road and just a few hundred yards from the stone arch of the Damascus Gate to Jerusalem’s Old City, Kathleen Riley supervised a wide array of tasks, from keeping track of visas to helping US citizens who lost passports. Her most difficult job was making the sort of telephone call she placed on Sunday morning to Arline Duker’s house in Teaneck, New Jersey.