A conservative Jewish group in New York said on Monday it planned to put armed patrols on the streets to guard against possible terrorist attacks, despite police warnings that its members could face arrest.
Rabbi Yakov Lloyd, founder and president of the Jewish Defence Group, said groups armed with sidearms and shotguns would begin night-time patrols in the Borough Park and Flatbush areas of Brooklyn from June 16.
Lloyd said the move was a response to recent news reports that terrorists who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993 had originally targeted both neighbourhoods, which have large Jewish communities.
However, the New York police department warned that the initiative could be illegal. ”If these individuals go on the streets with firearms they will be arrested,” said police representative Mike Wysokowski.
While US gun laws allow widespread gun ownership, there are severe restrictions in New York state on carrying concealed, loaded weapons in public.
Lloyd stressed that at least four of the 55 people who had signed up for the patrols were already licensed to carry loaded sidearms.
He also said a ”dozen cool-tempered people” with shotgun licenses would be involved. ”We have lawyers working now to see if it would be possible for these people to carry the shotguns in bags with the ammunition in their side pockets,” said Lloyd.
”The rest will be armed with pipes and baseball bats,” he said, rejecting suggestions that the patrols were provocative.
”My concern is what will happen if this is not done. Having 100 or so armed Jews on the streets will stop these terrorists in their tracks,” he said, adding that the patrols did not reflect a lack of confidence in the police.
”My motto is ‘the more the merrier’,” he said. Lloyd also cited the precedent of similar patrols that operated in New York after the murder of a Jewish student in the late 1980s and a series of arson attacks on synagogues in the mid-1990s.
An ordained orthodox rabbi, Lloyd founded the Jewish Defence Group in 1985 ”to combat anti-Semitism and defend Jews.” The threat against the Jewish community here was revealed in a recent interview given to a US television network by Abdul Rahman Yasmin, who is wanted by the FBI in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
Yasmin, currently in Iraq, said he and his accomplices had originally planned to attack Jewish neighbourhoods in Brooklyn. – Sapa-AFP