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CNN Live Sunday

Suicide Bomber Kills At Least 3 in Netanya

Aired May 19, 2002 - 18:16   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
JONATHAN KARL, CNN ANCHOR: In the Middle East today, another terrorist strike, this time in the Israeli coastal resort city of Netanya. A suicide bomber dressed as an Israeli soldier killed three Israelis and wounded at least 56 other people. CNN's Anand Naidoo joins us now with the latest -- Anand.

ANAND NAIDOO, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Jonathan, it's just after one o'clock here in Netanya, Israel and the clean-up is still going on almost nine hours after the bomb blast went off.

I'm going to step out of the way right now to show you the plane is hosing down the area. In fact, where that cleaner is standing right now is exactly where the bomb went off. You can see some of the evidence of where that bomb went off over there. There are mangled pieces of metal on either side of that store, fruit and vegetable store over there that bore the brunt of that bomb blast. There was also damage to the other side of the market there.

Now I have some casualty figures to update you on. The death toll in this bomb blast has now risen to four, two more people died from their injuries in hospital. The initial blast killed the bomber, an Israeli civilian. Two more people died afterwards in hospital. Thirty-six people have been injured in this bomb blast, 11 of them seriously.

I talked to an official from the Netanya Mayor's Office earlier on and she told me that of those 11 people, all of them have been undergoing emergency surgery.

Now police tell us that they received no specific warning before this bomb blast went off. It went off at just after 4:00, 4:15 in the afternoon here in Netanya.

Netanya is a town which is in northern Israel. It's on the coast. It's about 20 miles north of Tel Aviv and it's very close to the West Bank border town of Tulkarem.

Police telling us that they received no warning before the bomb blast went off. They also told us that they have been receiving generalized warnings about bomb blasts for the past 18 months, but in this case there was no specific warning.

Now they also tell us that in this particular area here, Netanya, there have been several bomb blasts over the past 18 months. This city has borne the brunt of many of those bomb blasts. In fact, the most notorious of the bomb blasts was at the end of March on the eve of Passover when a bomb blast killed 29 people and it was that very bomb blast that, of course, triggered off Operation Defensive Shield, which resulted in Israeli troops taking that incursion into the West Bank. Jonathan.

KARL: All right, Anand, thank you very much for that report and we'll be looking for more from you later. Thank you.

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