Saudi Prince Posts Bounty For Capturing Israeli

The Saudis continue playing games and boosting terror groups with their actions. Their latest? A Saudi prince has gone and posted a $1 million bounty for a Palestinian terror group to go and capture an Israeli to be used as a pawn in another prisoner swap.

Prince Khaled bin Talal, brother of billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, told the kingdom's al-Daleel TV station by telephone Saturday that he was raising a previous offer made by Sheik Awadh al-Qarani, a prominent Saudi cleric who promised $100,000 for capturing an Israeli soldier.

"I tell Sheik al-Qarani that I support you and I will pay $900,000 to make it one million dollars to capture an Israeli soldier to release other prisoners," said a voice identified as Prince Khaled, who holds no official position in the government.

The Saudi offers follow in the wake of the release of Israeli soldier Sgt. Gilad Schalit, who was held by Hamas in Gaza for more than five years. Israel has agreed to free over 1,000 prisoners in exchange.

Prince Khaled said he made the offer in response to what he said were Israeli threats against Qarani's life. He did not provide any further details.

In Israel, extremists have offered two rewards of $100,000 to anyone who kills a Palestinian released in the Schalit deal if the Palestinian killed Israelis.

There's a difference between Israeli extremists who Israel itself arrests and castigates for such actions, and a Saudi prince who is putting up $1 million to entice Palestinian terror groups to carry out terror attacks.

This isn't just moral equivalence, but the Saudi regime playing games and putting up money so as to continue the Arab Israeli conflict. Throwing money around is what the Saudis do best, and they're hoping to curry favor among the Palestinians after they took a back seat to the Egyptians who helped negotiate a deal to release Shalit for over 1,000 Palestinian terrorists held in Israeli jails.

It's also another reason that there is no peace between Israel and its neighbors - the Arab regimes still refuse to recognize Israel's rights to exist and they use the Palestinians as cannon fodder and a diversion for domestic consumption. They have no interest in peaceful relations because it gets in the way of the hate.

Amateur Sleuths Helped NYPD Crack Kletzky Case

After Leiby Kletzky disappeared and the tight-knit Orthodox Jewish community mobilized to try and find him, one of those men looking for him found critical pieces of information that helped lead to his admitted killer. While many assumed that Kletzky had walked along a predetermined route, Yaakov German was able to get a hold of surveillance video from several local stores and realized that instead of walking down 13th Ave, he never made a critical turn, and continued walking in a different direction away from his home. That meant that searchers were looking in the wrong direction.

Additional persistence paid off as they eventually uncovered video showing Kletzky along with Levi Aron:

When 44th St. dead-ended at Dahill Road, the trail seemed to go cold again.

A video store had footage that showed only sidewalks on one side of the street. Benchers Unlimited had footage of both sidewalks but no sign of the boy.

Then German spotted newly installed cameras at a car-leasing company, Tristate Fleet. That's when they spotted Aron, the man who would be later identified as Leiby's killer.

"We found the kid," German said. "We saw somebody going with him and back forth. We watched it in slow motion.

"We saw the perp going across the avenue, going into a white house, up three steps, going in for three minutes and coming back out. We went by and saw it was a dentist's office."

All this time, German was feeding information to Mayer, the liaison to the NYPD, and he was sharing it with detectives.

At about 5:30 p.m., cops arrived at Tristate. "They came in here, screeching tires," said owner Yehuda Bernstein, 40.

Cracking the case

Cops, who confirmed German's account, tracked down the dentist at home. They learned that Aron was the only patient who had been in and out quickly - to pay a bill - and they got his address.

Soon after, they swarmed Aron's house on E. Second St., where they found Leiby's severed feet in the freezer, 2 miles from where the rest of his body would be found in a Dumpster.

German, who shopped at the hardware store where Aron was a clerk, was outside the house when cops made the arrest early Wednesday.

"I never saw a detective with tears before in my life," he said. "They said, 'They don't have the whole body.' We all started crying."

Alon has confessed to the killing, but not all aspects of his confession match up with the evidence released to date. He says that he killed Kletzky after panicking over how the community reacted to his disappearance, but it also appears that Kletzky put up a fight before being killed by suffocation with a towel.

His lawyer claims that Aron hears voices and he's currently undergoing psychiatric evaluation, and I suspect that his lawyers will lay the groundwork for either an insanity defense or a reduced manslaughter charge on extreme emotional disturbance rather than murder 2.

This case is going to be a challenge for Brooklyn prosecutors as the jury pool all but likely to be prejudiced against Aron. Heck, even hardened criminals were yelling at Aron outside his arraignment:

Even hardened criminals agreed with the commissioner, screaming, "You f--king killer!" in Brooklyn Criminal Court before Aron pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder and kidnapping charges.

Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes said his office confiscated Aron's computers and will also investigate whether Aron had previous improper contact with kids here and in Tennessee, where he previously lived.

A disheveled Aron was held without bail and ordered to undergo psychiatric evaluation on Rikers Island after his lawyer told the judge his client "hears voices and suffers from hallucinations."

Investigators also confirmed that Alon did attend a wedding in Monsey, New York hours after Kletzky was abducted although quite a few people say that they didn't know or recognize him. Apparently, he was a distant cousin of the bride. The boy was never seen inside the wedding hall, and would have stood out because of his distinctive appearance (Kletzky had "payot" (long locks of hair in front of his ears), which is common in the Hasidic community, but not in the traditional Orthodox community.

Police are continuing to try to corroborate the admissions, and to pinpoint the timeline leading up to Aron's capture.

Investigators Looking at Whether Brooklyn Butcher Is Serial Killer

So much about the tragic end of 8-year-old Leiby Kletzky remains unanswered despite claims that admitted killer Levi Aron kidnapped and then killed Kletzky when he panicked over the reaction of the local community to the disappearance.

The boy was apparently lost and but for a wrong two, their paths may not have crossed. The two were together for several hours before Kletzky was killed.

According to the obtained statement, Aron told police he wanted a ride to a bookstore but then lost interest.

"So I asked if he wanted to go for the ride -- (a) wedding in Monsey -- since I didn't think I was going to stay for the whole thing since my back was hurting. He said OK," Aron told police.

They returned to Aron's home around 11:20 p.m. Monday night and watched television before going to sleep in separate rooms, Aron told police. Police said Aron, who is divorced, lives alone in an attic in a building shared with his father and uncle.

Aron told police he planned to return Kletzky to his home Tuesday.

Apparently unaware that a search was already in progress for the boy, Aron left his home Tuesday to find photos of the missing boy on fliers distributed in the neighborhood.

"When I saw the flyers I panicked and was afraid," he told police. "I was still in panic ... and afraid to bring him home. That is when I went for a towel to smother him in the side room. He fought back a little bit."

Now with the body of a dead boy in his home, he told police he panicked again "because I didn't know what to do with the body." He detailed to police how he dismembered the body.

A day-and-a-half search led police to Aron's home after midnight Wednesday morning after seeing him on a surveillance video with the child. They asked: Where is the boy?

The man nodded toward the kitchen, authorities said, where blood stained the freezer door. Inside was the stuff of horror films -- severed feet, wrapped in plastic. In the refrigerator, a cutting board and three bloody carving knives. A plastic garbage bag with bloody towels was nearby.

Aron's actions aren't one of a panicked individual who murdered someone in an act of desperation. Instead, it seems fully calculated and methodical. Parts of Kletzky were found in Aron's fridge, which was empty besides the remains and bloody instruments used in the dismemberment. The rest of the body was found in luggage discarded in a trash bin outside an auto parts store two miles from Aron's home.

It's little wonder then, that investigators are looking at whether Aron is a serial killer and are reexamining cold cases in New York and in Tennessee where Aron lived for several years. Aron's actions and behavior gave people the willies, but he had but one police citation for public urination.

The break in the Kletzky case came when video showed the boy getting into a car outside a dentist's office. Police tracked down the doctor to his New Jersey home, and that led to a tip on Aron.

Kletzky was buried yesterday as thousands of people from the tight-knit Jewish community came to pay their respects. He would have been nine next week.

Don't Count On Reports For Deal To Release Gilad Shalit

We've been down this road too many times to count in the nearly five years since Gilad Shalit was captured by Hamas in a cross-border raid from Gaza that killed two other Israelis. He's been held somewhere in Gaza by the Islamic terror group ever since the June 25, 2006 raid.

And apparently the reports of a pending deal were too good to be true.

Prisoner exchange talks between Israel and Hamas, geared at the release of abducted Israel Defense Forces soldier Gilad Shalit, were near their fruition, the Palestinian envoy to Russia said on Thursday.

The comment by Fayed Mustafa, quoted by Russian news agency RIA Novosti, came after Egypt's former ambassador to Israel ignited a rumor frenzy after he was cited in the Al Masry Al Youm newspaper as saying that the Shalit deal was just hours away.

Later Thursday the Prime Minister's Office denied that there were any significant progress in Shalit talks, a claim that was seconded by an Egyptian official speaking to Haaretz.

However, speaking with the Russian news agency RIA Novosti, Palestinian envoy to Russia Fayed Mustafa said that "negotiations between Israel and Hamas, ongoing in Cairo with Egyptian mediation, are close to completion."

The RIA report stated that the Palestinian official provided no further information.

As they have since the outset, Hamas continues demanding the release of 1,000 or more terrorists from Israeli jails as part of the deal, including top terrorist like Marwan Barghouti.

Hamas refuses to grant the ICRC access to Shalit to confirm his state of health, and instead has demanded prisoner releases to secure a video showing Shalit was alive (that happened last year).

Islamic Terrorists Murder Pro-Palestinian Supporter Because He Wasn't Muslim

An al-Qaeda-inspired group calling itself al-Tawhid wal-Jihad, or Monotheism and Holy War, murdered a member of the International Solidarity Movement, which itself is a radical leftist pro Palestinian group. The group released a video and tortured their victim before strangling him:

The body of Vittorio Arrigoni, 36, was discovered by Hamas security forces in an empty house in Gaza City a day after he had been seized, officials said. Arrigoni had been strangled with a plastic handcuff strip, said Khalil Abu Shamala, director of Al-Dameer Association for Human Rights, who went to the scene with security officials. He said Arrigoni’s head was bloodied, apparently from being beaten before he was killed.

“It seems that he was subjected to torture,” Abu Shamala said in a telephone interview. “I have seen many bodies during the intifada and after assassinations by Israeli soldiers, but I was totally shocked when I saw the way they killed him.”

Curiously, this supposed proponent for human rights ignores years and piles of evidence of Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups to instead equate the death of this Italian activist with Israel's actions.

He certainly knows what to say to his intended audience - equate the murder of the ISM supporter with the killings of Palestinians at the hands of Israel (which is acting in self defense).

Apparently that human rights guy has never seen the handiwork of Hamas during the Palestinian civil war - when they were throwing Fatah thugs off rooftops, or the bodies of Palestinians who died when Hamas rockets/mortars fell into Gaza instead of Israel, or when Hamas bomb factories blew up in own-goals, to say nothing of all the torture by Hamas of their enemies at any point since Hamas took over.

He also knows that to speak the truth about Hamas' human rights abuses, torture, and violence would result in a shortened lifespan (and a violent and tortured end as well). The Islamists who have run amok in Gaza routinely ignore human rights laws and condone violence of this sort, and yet Palestinian human rights groups ignore such activities and instead focus on Israel - precisely because it fits into the Palestinian propaganda machine - and because to speak out against the terror groups would result in their own lives being put at risk.

Once again, this highlights that Islamist terrorist groups will murder people who self-identify with the Palestinian cause precisely because they aren't sufficiently Islamist (or in this case, because the person was Christian). ISM ought to realize that in their incessant demonization of Israel they have not only exposed the true nature of the group they purport to support (the Palestinians), but that their actions have bolstered terror groups throughout Gaza and the West Bank.

Hamas has no problem doing the same kind of thing, but does so more judiciously - after all, they fire mortars, rockets and missiles into Israel each with the intent of murdering and maiming anyone they hit. Several non-Israelis have been among the injured and killed, so the Washington Post spin as making the terror group Hamas seem more palatable is distasteful to say the least. It's reprehensible.