Army catches Café Hillel bombing planner

By YAAKOV KATZ
After years of evading capture, the IDF nabbed a top Hamas operative in Ramallah overnight Sunday who was behind a series of terrorist attacks starting in the 1990s that killed dozens of Israelis.
Maher Ouda, a Hamas military commander in Ramallah, was arrested in a joint IDF, Israel Police and Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) operation. He was involved in the Café Hillel bombing in Jerusalem and an attack at a hitchhiking post for soldiers outside a main entrance to the Tzrifin army base and Assaf Harofeh Medical Center, near Rishon Lezion, that together killed 16 Israelis and wounded more than 80 within six hours on September 9, 2003.
From Ein Yabrud, 7 km. northeast of Ramallah, Ouda, 47, was one of the founders of Hamas’s military wing and was involved in attacks that led to the deaths of dozens of Israelis. He has been on Israel’s most wanted list since the late 1990s.
“He has a lot of blood on his hands,” a source in the IDF CentralCommand said. “This shows that we have the ability to get to peopleeven years after they perpetrated their attacks.”
Ouda becameinvolved in terrorism two decades ago, when he founded a Hamas cell inYabrud. The cell kidnapped and interrogated Palestinians suspected ofcollaborating with Israel and acquired weapons that were used inanti-Israel terrorist attacks. The Palestinian Authority detained Oudafor questioning in 1998 and he was interred in a PA prison for severalmonths and released.