Does the Slaying of the Late Cahane’s Son in 2000 Fit Into a Wider Picture – Like That of His Father in 1990?

Although they died ten years apart, both father and son, Meir and Binyamin Zeev Cahane, were killed in circumstances concurrent with, or linked to, apparently unconnected events. The son, who faithfully followed his father’s anti-Arab, ultra-nationalist precepts, attempted in 1994 to revive the banned Jewish Defense league and Kach in the form of a group called “Cahane Hai” (Cahane Lives). That movement, like its predecessors, was outlawed for incitement to violence against Arabs, its founder jailed more than once. Since the eruption of the Palestinian uprising last September, the movement has enjoyed a revival – chiefly in the form of the graffiti, “Cahane Was Right!”
On Sunday, Dec. 31, 2000, at 6.40 am, Binyamin Cahane, at the wheel of a minivan, and his wife Talya beside him, were shot dead in a hail of 60 Kalashnikov bullets on the busy highway to Jerusalem, 500 m. south of the Jewish settlement of Ofra to the north of Ramallah on the West Bank. Their five small daughters were injured – one gravely. Their only son had been dropped off five minutes earlier and was safe. debkafile‘ s anti-terrorist sources report that the killers were three Tanzim militiamen from Ramallah, helped in tracking down their target by elements outside the West Bank.
Three hours, 40 minutes before that deadly ambush, the remains of 33 Egyptians, killed when EgyptAir flight 990 crashed into the Atlantic in October 1999, were flown home. Among them were 20 Egyptian military officers. The United States investigation into the cause of the crash caused immense controversy in Egypt for alleging that the Egyptian co-pilot Gameel al-Batouti deliberately crashed the plane shortly after takeoff from New York. President Hosni Mubarak hotly disputed the allegation, claiming that something in the air over that part of America was causing planes to crash.
Could the attack on Binyamin Cahane and events around the EgyptAir disaster be connected?
Before answering that question, debkafile digs deep down into its files and comes up with a link between the ten-year old murder in New York of Rabbi Meir Cahane and… the subsequent US embassy bombings in East Africa in August 1998 in which more than 200 were killed. It just so happened that the same perpetrators, the same terrorist infrastructure and the same violent philosophy actuated both acts of violence. An Egyptian called El Sayyid A. Nosair is still serving a life sentence in a high-security jail in Manhattan for murdering Meir Cahane in New York. Serving with him is another Egyptian, a friend called Aly Muhamed, who is awaiting trial for his part in the 1988 embassy blasts and for belonging to the notorious Osama Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda organization.
On Tuesday, December 1, 1998, the New York Times senior intelligence correspondent, Benjamin Weiser, ran a lengthy profile on Aly Mohamed, a very strange story that described him as having been an Egyptian army intelligence officer in the seventies and a security officer with EgyptAir in the eighties, during which time he also carried out terrorist prevention assignments for the CIA and the FBI. In 1985, Aly Mohamed, by a means not explained by the correspondent, enlisted in the American Army and got himself assigned to the Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, home to the elite top-secret anti-terrorist commando units known as Delta Force and the Seals. During his five years at Fort Bragg, the Egyptian recruit instructed US elite soldiers in Islamic and Middle East mindsets. Without requesting permission, he would frequently disappear from the base for weeks on end, to spend time with Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan. There, he instructed Bin Laden’s men in the advanced US commando combat techniques he had picked up at For Bragg.
Now for the link to the murder of Meir Cahane. This is a direct quote from the New York Times article cited above:
“In 1989, officers at Fort Bragg cast Mr. Mohamed as the star of a series of training videotapes intended to give soldiers a taste of how Islamic radicals view the world. On one tape, he says of Israel, ‘From the Islamic perspective, nobody can recognize Israel has the right to live, because Israel stole an Islamic territory. ‘We do not accept no peace,’ he adds. ‘No international conference. Nothing. No compromise.’
“That same year, Mr. Mohamed apparently began working more closely with Islamic extremists in the United States.”
He disappeared from Fort Bragg on weekends, traveled to the New York area and offered military training to several militants associated with a refugee center in Brooklyn. He often stayed with El Sayyid A. Nosair, the Egyptian immigrant convicted of killing Rabbi Meir Kahane, the founder of the Jewish Defense League, in 1990.
“Prosecutors now assert that the refugee center was the principal base in the United States for Mr. Bin Laden’s group, Al Qaeda.”
Shortly after Aly Mohamed and Nosair became acquainted, the latter murdered Rabbi Meir Cahane.
This is the first of two exclusive articles on the Targeting of the Two Cahanes. The second and last is coming soon.