Palestinians arrest three over US convoy attack

Palestinian police arrested three suspected militants and hunted for two more over a bomb attack on a US diplomatic convoy that killed three security guards in the Gaza Strip, Palestinian security sources said yesterday.

They announced the arrests as international pressure mounted on Palestinian authorities to crack down on militants after the bombing, the first to kill Americans during a three-year-old uprising against Israel for statehood.

The US guards were killed when a bomb, set off apparently by remote control, wrecked their armoured jeep on Wednesday.

Five investigators from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) arrived in the region overnight, a spokesman for the US embassy in Israel said. "They are going about their work on the ground and expect to go into Gaza at some point."

Palestinian security officials said they were making headway in their investigation into the attack and that it was possible the bombers had links with a foreign group, such as Lebanese guerillas backed by Iran and Syria.

But the officials stressed that this was just one of several leads they were following.

"People behind the attack could either be linked to some group abroad such as Hizbollah or Iran's Revolutionary Guard who partially fund and support the Popular Resistance Committees," one senior Palestinian official said.

Hizbollah has no branch in the Palestinian areas but "it does have links with some individuals here," the official said. "The state of total chaos and the power vacuum in Palestinian areas makes us believe that all options are possible," he said.

According to Palestinian security sources, three men they have detained since Wednesday belonged to the Popular Resistance Committees, an umbrella group of militants that carried out previous roadside bombings against Israeli forces.

"A few hours after the bombing... Palestinian security forces detained three people as part of the investigation conducted by the Palestinian Authority into the incident," a security official told Reuters in Gaza.

All three were rounded up in the Jabalya refugee camp, a militant hotbed next to the site of the attack, they said.

Two more members of the group were being sought and an attempt to arrest one of them in the nearby town of Beit Lahiya sparked a gunbattle between militants and security forces during which he escaped, according to the sources and witnesses.

Seven Palestinians - two of them policemen - were wounded in the shoot-out, local medics said. Militants set tires ablaze and police withdrew from the area.

A leader of the Popular Resistance Committees, many of whose followers used to be part of the Islamic militant group Hamas or Palestinian President Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, confirmed the arrested men were members but denied any involvement.

The United States, the United Nations and European Union blamed lax Palestinian security for the bombing and demanded reforms by Palestinian authorities to rein in militant violence, a central requirement of an internationally backed peace plan.

Arafat said he had taken "concrete" action, alluding to the arrests. "We sent our security groups (to investigate) and from yesterday we did not sleep... There is something concrete which we have done," he told reporters at his West Bank compound.