Hamas founder released to hero's welcome in Jordan

The Washington Post

JERUSALEM - In a predawn helicopter flight from a maximum security prison yesterday, Israel dispatched the ailing founder of the Hamas Islamic movement to a hero's welcome in Jordan.

Jordanian and Palestinian officials, in comments met with silence in Israel, described the sudden pardon of Sheik Ahmed Yassin as an Israeli effort at damage control after a botched assassination attempt in the Jordanian capital last week. Israel's army put out a brief statement at 4 a.m. citing only Yassin's failing health and a request from Jordan's King Hussein for "positive steps which will help the peace process." Government officials declined to elaborate.

The deliverance of one of Israel's mortal enemies, who has renounced neither the Palestinian claim to all of the land on which the Jewish state now stands nor the use of violence to obtain it, had more than a little mystery about it. The drama came

AP PHOTO The family of Shiekh Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader of the Islamic resistance movement Hamas, watch television in their home yesterday in Gaza City after hearing reports about Yassin's release from prison.

at the meeting point of multiple political weaknesses among Palestinian, Israeli and Jordanian leaders, all of whom have relationships with Hamas that are troubled at best.

Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who has struggled with Hamas for political dominance but adopted the imprisoned Yassin as a national symbol, was embarrassed at Israel's decision to bypass him and fly the Gaza-born cleric to Jordan. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, mere weeks after the last Hamas suicide bombing in Jerusalem, felt obliged for the second time this year to abandon a long-held Israeli criminal claim against a senior leader of the Islamic Resistance Movement, as Hamas is formally known.

The greater political need, in Netanyahu's judgment, apparently belonged to King Hussein. What created it was a cloak-and-dagger episode last week in which, Jordanian officials and Hamas spokesperson said, Israeli agents, in Amman and carrying Canadian passports, used exotic technology and tried to kill another Hamas leader, Khaled Meshal.

That operation deeply embarrassed Hussein, already engaged in delicate political negotiations with his own militant Islamic opposition.

Without naming Israel, but hinting strongly that the Jewish state was responsible, Hussein said in a speech Tuesday that his government knows who was behind the attack, which left Meshal in intensive care at a military hospital outside Amman. Twice in the speech he called on Netanyahu to effect Yassin's immediate release, and semiofficial Jordanian newspapers reported that the monarch demanded Yassin in exchange for the two alleged Israeli agents.

The attack on Meshal and his bodyguards was initially described as a traffic dispute involving Canadian tourists. But Jordanian and Palestinian officials said interrogation of the two men disclosed that they hold Israeli nationality as well and had come to kill the Hamas political leader.

Moshe Fogel, chief of Israel's government press office, declined to confirm or deny those assertions.

According to Abdel Aziz Rantissi, a Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip, Meshal's assailants attacked him with a device that poisoned him in ways yet unknown. Meshal's bodyguards gave chase, and the two assailants fled first by car and then on foot. As they engaged in a fist fight with the bodyguards on an Amman street, police arrived and arrested them.

Canadian diplomats said the two men, detained in Amman, refused consular services and asked only that the embassy not identify them in public. They remained in custody last night.

Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien referred to the episode in Ottawa Wednesday in terms that suggested he credits the Jordanian accounts. He said he is still investigating what happened but described as "completely unacceptable to this government that anybody authorized by another government will use a Canadian passport to perpetrate any illegal action."

Baffled by Meshal's symptoms, Jordanian doctors found themselves unable to help. A senior source in the royal palace said President Clinton intervened, at Hussein's personal request, to obtain a specific medicine needed to counter the effects of the attack.

In April, Netanyahu gave up Israel's bid for extradition of Mousa Abu Marzook, a senior Hamas political leader then living in the United States. Israel had accused him of funding and ordering a series of lethal suicide bombings in the Jewish state. But it lost its zeal for bringing him to trial when army and secret service chiefs warned that it could touch off more Israeli-Palestinian violence.

Yassin, a Muslim cleric, is quadriplegic and suffering multiple breakdowns in health. Israel handed him a life sentence in 1989, a year after he established Hamas as an offshoot of the pan-Arab Muslim Brotherhood, but has debated his release for some time because his death in jail was deemed likely to inflame passions.

But successive governments said they would not release him without a renunciation of violence. Israel made no claim yesterday that Yassin gave such a promise, and Hamas spokesperson said he had made none.

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