Ramallah Cop: I Tried To Stop Mob

A week after an angry mob lynched two Israeli soldiers, the details of the attack are still emerging and its ramifications still being felt.

A Palestinian police officer's version of the events leading to the brutal killings provided more details on the soldiers' final moments.

Meanwhile, Palestinians believe that a clandestine Israeli Army unit may have entered Palestinian territory to arrest six suspects in the killings, and claim that violated the spirit of a cease-fire the sides pledged to work toward at a summit earlier this week.

Israeli officials said the two reserve army sergeants killed by the mob lost their way and accidentally drove into the path of a Palestinian funeral procession in the West Bank town of Ramallah on Oct. 12.

Many in the mob believed the two were Israeli undercover agents, something the government has denied.

The soldiers south shelter at a Palestinian police station, but members of the angry crowd climbed into the building and began beating the two men.

Col. Kamal al-Sheikh, the station's commander, said Thursday he tried to protect one of the men during the attack, but he was hit by the assailants with a metal chair and hurled against a wall.

Moments later, the attackers struck the Israeli, cowering on the floor, with office equipment, including a computer and a fax machine.

"There were knives, as well as kicking and punching," he said.

Al-Sheik denied Israeli allegations that Palestinian policemen joined in the attack.

Al-Sheikh said he pushed away the crowd, bundled the critically injured Israeli into a car and had him driven to the nearest Israeli checkpoint, where he later died. The second soldier was killed at the scene, his body thrown head first from a second-story window of the Ramallah police station.

Their corpses were so mangled that reports in Israel said they had to be identified from dental records and fingerprints.

The murders provoked swift Israeli retaliation. Within hours, helicopter gunships fired rockets at the police station where the murders took place and struck other targets in Ramallah and the harbor next to Arafat's Gaza headquarters.

Prime Minister Ehud Barak promised, "We will settle accounts."

CBS News Correspondent David Hawkins reports the men who were arrested in connection with the attack were identified from gruesome videotape taken at the scene.

The details of the Israeli operation remain secret, but Israeli security sources said the six were arrested overnight from Monday evening until Tuesday morning by commandos from the army's elite Sayeret Matkal unit, which specializes in clandestine operations, assisted by other special Israeli forces.

The sources said the suspects were in Israel and were being interrogated.

If Israeli commandos infiltrated Palestinian territory to make the arrests, it would likely provoke an outburst of fury among Palestinians, said Palestinian militia leader Hussein Sheik.

"I think our reaction will be very grave—this gives Palestinians a free hand," Sheik told Israel's Channel One. "Now, you give us the right to go after those who killed Mohammed al-Dura"—a 12-year-old Palestinian boy slain in a hail of Israeli gunfire in the Gaza Strip on Sept. 30 as his father desperately tried to shield him.

And if it turns out that Chairman Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority cooperated with the Israeli operation, that could undermine his authority over militant Palestinian factions.

Israel's security forces have a long tradition of methodically hunting down those they consider responsible for terrorist attacks against Israeli citizens. After the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, the Mossad spy agency spent years tracking down and assassinating PLO leaders it held responsible.

Two years ago, an Israeli soldier was set upo and badly beaten by a mob outside Ramallah, an attack also filmed by news photographers. Almost a year later, Israeli authorities arrested one of the assailants.