Blast rocks heart of Tel Aviv

[okaawhatever]

Source: CBS News

Israeli police say an explosion has gone off in a car in Tel Aviv, but there is a "strong possibility" it is a criminal act.


Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said Thursday he believed the explosion near a bus was criminally motivated, though he could not definitively rule out that it was political violence.


Rescue services spokesman Zaki Heller says preliminary reports from the scene indicated seven to 10 people were wounded in the explosion




Read more: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-202_162-57563211/blast-rocks-heart-of-tel-aviv/

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I believe it may have been a car bomb.

[okaawhatever]

1. From correspondent: Target was head of leading crime family

Report: Target was 'head of leading crime family'
by John Ray - Middle East Correspondent
Israeli media are reporting that the apparent target of the Tel Aviv explosion, the head of a leading crime family who is being named locally as Nissim Alperon, escaped after spotting the bomber approaching.

[SkyDaddy7]

2. WOW!

I had no idea the mafia or should I say "Organized Crime" was that big in Israel.

[starroute]

3. Google on "Israeli Mafia" or "Israeli Mafiya"

Then ignore all the crap that comes up from neo-Nazi sites and just read the sober stuff.

Basically, when the former Soviet Union agreed to let Jewish emigrants leave in the 1980s, the loophole was taken advantage of by a lot of criminals who were only nominally Jewish or not Jewish at all. And after Communism fell and organized crime took advantage of the social disarray in Eastern Europe and Russia, powerful criminal networks arose that were strongly tied in with those emigres in both Israel in the United States.

Israel also provides a useful haven for criminals because they have strong banking secrecy laws that make money-laundering easy and are highly resistant to extradition requests filed on Israeli citizens. Both things grow out of a determination to protect Jews against persecution, but both are being exploited for criminal purposes.

I have a feeling that the heyday of the Israeli Mafia was in the 1990s, and that their native-born offspring aren't as interested in a life of crime. But they're still around and still a disruptive element.

[Tempest]

4. Very big.

"In 2002, the Israel Police documented 464,854 criminal files and non-prosecution cases while the number was 484,688 in 2003. This was an increase of 4.5% over 2002."

Those were mafia related files and cases.