TEL AVIV. He was the father of six daughters and worked as a janitor in a school, was 45-year-old Yousef Abu Jaber, the alleged bomber who killed Alessandro Parini yesterday evening and injured a group of tourists by running over them with his car in Tel Aviv. Killed on the spot by the police, Abu Jaber was an Israeli citizen, residing in Kafr Qassem, east of Tel Aviv. He had no criminal record and had been working for some years as a janitor in a middle school in Kiryat Ono, a suburb of Tel Aviv. «I knew Yousef Abu Jaber, he was a very nice person with all the staff. Many things are not yet clear. I never imagined he was a potential terrorist,” a school employee told Ynet. Students and teachers of the school, the site reports, say that the man loved to laugh and dance. And that two years ago he had invited teachers to his home to share Iftar, the meal that marks the breaking of the daytime fast of Ramadan. The alleged attacker’s brother, Omar Abu Jaber, told the Ynet site that he believes what happened last night was an accident and not a deliberate attack. “Yousef had six daughters, he had grandchildren, he loved everyone and was always smiling. He was against the (terrorist) attacks, unequivocally,” the brother said.
The doubts: it might not be terrorism
The Israeli police are considering the possibility that it was not a terrorist act. The online edition of Haaretz writes it, quoting the commander of the Tel Aviv police, Ami Eshed, according to which the Shin Bet, the security services, is also involved in the investigation. A police source explained that a toy gun was not found in the alleged attacker’s car – as reported by the main Israeli media in the hours following the attack – but a toy gun. A relative of the main suspect Yousef Abu Jaber, always told Haaretz that he could not “believe that he did such a thing, it is inconceivable that Yousef, a very calm and respectful person, did this. We are in total shock and if we had known his intentions in advance we would have prevented him. He has never shown signs of radicalism and has never had any ideological background ».
Brother: “He was against the attacks, unequivocally”
It was not a terrorist attack but a “car accident”. This was told to the Israeli newspaper Ynet by Omar Abu Jaber, brother of the alleged Tel Aviv bomber Yousef Abu Jaber, who last night driving a car hit several pedestrians on the Tel Aviv seafront causing the death of the Italian citizen Alessandro Parini and the injuring other tourists. According to Omar Abu Jaber, the brother lost control of the vehicle because he had not slept for several days due to mourning for his cousin. «Yusuf has six daughters, he has grandchildren, he loved them all. He was always smiling, we thought God created him in such a way that he couldn’t be tough. Many people know him in Kfar Qassem, he has a shop selling children’s toys and CDs, people from Shaare Tikva, Maornit and Mrosh Ha’Ein also buy from him», his brother recounts, confirming that the alleged assassin also worked as a cleaning in a school, to support the family.
“He was against the attacks, unequivocally,” says Omar Abu Jaber. And again: «From the video we can see that it was a car accident. He tried at all costs to minimize the damage and even put himself in danger. We all saw in the video how he went onto the lawn, rolled and flipped over,” he says, adding that “if he had intended to kill him he would have tried to cause as much damage as possible.”