Latest Mideast bomber was not among usual suspects

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By Henry Chu ~ Los Angeles Times

HEBRON, West Bank -- By the time Raed Abdel-Hamed Masq was 16, he had memorized the Quran, chapter and verse.

Religion consumed him, and he wanted it to consume others as well. As an adult, he encouraged his wife, his students and his teachers to learn the scriptures by heart. He was incensed by coarse and blasphemous talk.

And on Fridays, in various local mosques, he got to preach his hard-line version of what the Quran meant: establish a pure Islamic state; end the plague of Israeli occupation; avenge the deaths of martyrs.

Ultimately, Masq's interpretation of Islam led the 30-year-old father of two to don the garb of his perceived enemy, an observant Jew, and blow himself up Tuesday on a Jerusalem bus. The attack - one of the deadliest in three years of fighting - killed 20 other people, including several children, and imperiled a sputtering plan to bring peace to this war-torn region.

Sitting in her parents' home Tuesday night, Arij Masq heard her husband's name on television in connection with the bombing and prayed - not out of grief but gratitude.

"I prayed twice to God thanking him for this honor," she said Wednesday, sitting quiet and composed at a relative's home. "I'm so proud that God allowed him to be a martyr."

Family and friends, all women, were on hand to offer her their condolences and congratulations. A short distance away stood one of the imposing stone mosques in which her husband had exhorted worshipers to engage in what many Palestinians consider noble resistance and many Israelis call bloody murder.

Untypical profile

In some ways, despite his unyielding views, Masq didn't fit the usual profile of suicide bombers -- Palestinian zealots with whom Israel has become tragically familiar. He was, according to people who knew him, happily married, a doting father, a studious master's degree candidate and a passionate preacher with a gift for public speaking.

But he was also a member of the radical Muslim organization Hamas, which, along with Islamic Jihad, claimed responsibility for Tuesday's bus explosion.

He made his affiliation clear in a videotaped will broadcast on television after his death. Masq explained that he was on a mission to avenge Abdullah Kawasme, a Hamas operative killed by Israeli troops in June, and Mohammed Sidr, Islamic Jihad's top man in Hebron, who died in a shootout last week.

Only five days before Tuesday's bombing, Masq spoke eagerly of books he had ordered from Morocco and Syria to help him finish his degree, his cousin said.

Yet by then there had been signs of a darker ambition. Playing off the fact that "martyrdom" and "certificate," or diploma, are the same word in Arabic, he would sometimes say, "God grant that I will achieve martyrdom before my certificate," his wife recalled.