Police found anti-tank missiles and rocket-propelled grenades stashed in a
school and a kindergarten for special needs children in Abu Sinan, near Acre,
during a raid on Tuesday morning.
Also on Tuesday, police announced that
in a search at an elementary school in Taiba, east of Kfar Saba, officers found
an assault rifle and a pistol stashed underneath the floorboard of a classroom.
They also reported finding what appeared to be explosives.
Pictures put
out by police from the Abu Sinan raid show three LAW (light anti-tank weapon)
missiles and four RPGs, all of which were recently stolen from IDF depots. The
arms were found in a drainage canal and a small pond on the ground of the school
and kindergarten, along with raw explosives, grenades and hundreds of assault
rifle bullets.
Cmdr. Michael Shifshak, head of the northern branch of the
YAMAR investigative unit, told The Jerusalem Post that the weapons were somewhat
out of the ordinary, but added that two weeks ago at a village not far away
police seized more than 50 grenades and several AK-47 assault rifles.
The
village is mixed Muslim, Druse and Christian. Shifshak said police did not know
who the guns belonged to or who stole them, but that it was possible that a
Druse villager serving in the IDF stole the arms from an army depot. The raid
was conducted not long after the IDF reported the weapons stolen, and through
cooperation with the army police were able to pinpoint where the arms would most
likely have been taken to, he said.
He added that weapons were intended
for criminal use and that while they may have been intended for use in clan
feuds, they could have easily been sold across the country, with a single LAW
missile retailing for around NIS 70,000 on the black market, and an assault
rifle for around NIS 50,000.
Police “have placed a major emphasis on
fighting the arms trade in the Arab sector, which poses a major threat to daily
life,” Shifshak said.