TEL AVIV, March 21: A suicide bomber killed three people and wounded 40 others on Thursday on a busy street in occupied Al Quds, scuttling a round of truce talks scheduled between Palestinians and Israelis.

Security officials from both sides said new high-level talks scheduled to be held with US envoy Anthony Zinni were postponed after the bombing about two hours earlier.

An anonymous caller said the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a radical group linked to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement, was responsible for the bombing. “The Israelis cancelled the meeting, the Americans told us,” Colonel Jibril Rajoub, the head of West Bank preventative security, said.

There was no immediate word when they would resume, but the Israeli defence ministry said they had been “postponed”, adding that Defence Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer would be seeing Zinni during the evening.

Israeli spokesman Arieh Meckel said the government had to reassess the situation after the second suicide bombing in two days. He said Israeli security chiefs were meeting to discuss the aftermath of the blast.—AFP