JERUSALEM, March 4: Three Israelis sowed panic at a church in the hometown of Jesus on Friday when they entered the building and set off fireworks during a service, an Israeli police spokesman said.
The two women and a man were set upon by angry worshippers, who threatened to lynch them, and the man was reported injured.
After several hours of mayhem inside and rioting outside, police managed to evacuate the trio safely from the Roman Catholic Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth, in Israel’s northern region of Galilee.
Israeli media said the man was known to police and to the internal Shin Beth security service to be mentally deranged.
He was identified as Haim Eliahu Habibi, from Jerusalem. The two women were said to be his wife, a non-Israeli, and their 20-year-old daughter.
The Habibis achieved notoriety in 2002, when they sought political asylum for the wife after taking refuge in Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity.
Police reinforcements were called in to calm an angry crowd of hundreds gathered outside, an anti-terror unit was later called in to back them up and a helicopter could be seen hovering overhead with its spotlight on.
Security forces fired tear gas to disperse the protestors. Around a dozen police were injured in clashes and a police car was set on fire.
Internal Security Minister Gideon Ezra, who happened to be in Nazareth, confirmed that ‘two women and a man threw something that made a huge noise in the church. The police subsequently defended them from the crowd inside the church. We called in urgent reinforcements’.
Ezra said this was a ‘provocation whose motives we do not know for now’.—AFP
