The Chevrolet pursued them through traffic, the driver firing again and again. Fear gripped the students as they tried Lo avoid the shots and flying glass in the van. Four were wounded-two seriously. (One of the victims, Aaron Halberstam, 15, died last Saturday night.) The blue Chevrolet sped down an offramp and disappeared. The van, punctured with bullet holes and spattered with blood, stopped on a street corner. Survivors chanted the Sh’ma, the essential affirmation of Jewish faith.
Over the next 16 hours, New York police blanketed Brooklyn with the most intensive manhunt since the World Trade Center bombing-and got lucky. There was speculation that the shooting had been motivated by the massacre of Muslim worshipers in Hebron four days earlier. As city officials told it, crucial leads came from callers who saw a blue Chevrolet with its windshield and one front window blown out parked near an auto-body shop in Brooklyn. The cops traced the car to a nearby livery-car service. Early the next morning they raided the livery-car company, Pioneer Car Service, and arrested a 28-year-old Lebanese immigrant named Rashid Baz as the gunman. They also arrested the owner of the car service, Bassam Reyati, 27, a Jordanian immigrant, and Hlal Mohammed, the owner of the body shop. Searches turned up two 9-mm pistols allegedly used in the crime, a “street sweeper” semiautomatic shotgun and other weapons.
Though Baz’s attorney insisted they had arrested the wrong man, police said Baz confessed to the shooting during a videotaped interrogation. His only mistake, investigators said, had been to shoot out the windows of his own car while attacking the Lubavitchers’ van. That led him to take the car to the auto-body shop possibly to hide it but more likely to repair the damage. According to police accounts, Baz and Reyati stripped the car of its damaged windows and parked it on the street. Then Baz went to his aunt and uncle’s house and watched television. Later in the evening he went back to the Pioneer Car Service, where, an employee said, Baz and Reyati were “playing around as usual, joking.” Reyati’s wife says her husband was not involved in the crime.
The big question for worried New Yorkers was whether the shooting spree had been yet another terrorist plot, like the World Trade Center bombing. (The four defendants in the WTC case, who are Muslim fundamentalists, were found guilty of all charges last week.) ABC News reported that Baz and the other suspects were members of a “community” of militant Arabs that had been under surveillance by the FBI and the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service. But New York police officials said they had no evidence to suggest a wider plot or connections to Islamic militants, and they denied reports that the Pioneer Car Service had been under investigation before the shooting.
And Rashid Baz did not seem to be a likely terrorist. Born in Lebanon of a Druse father and a Palestinian mother, he immigrated to the United States on a student visa in 1984 and later married and separated. He was neither a devout Muslim nor a political militant, and police suspect he may have been a lookout for heroin dealers in the past. He owned guns and harbored grudges-“a livery-cab driver with an attitude,” according to one official. Still, there was no direct evidence that the Hebron massacre was part of his motive. According to police, Baz maintained that the incident began with a traffic dispute-a story that police doubted and the victims denied.
For the moment, at least, the investigative trail seemed to lead to the same old story-an embittered failure with a penchant for guns and a mind full of hate. And to New Yorkers, that was bad enough.
