On this day: Attack on the 405 bus July 6 1989: Terror on the
road to Jerusalem Fourteen people were killed in an incident
that has since been described as the first suicide attack on
Israelis. The attack, which also left 27 people with injuries,
occurred on the number 405 bus from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The
driver had reached the junction after the Israeli Arab village
of Abu Ghosh, when a man seized the steering wheel and began
shouting in Arabic. He pulled the bus to the right and, despite
a struggle with the driver, succeeded in making it go over the
side of a cliff. Among those killed were a Canadian schoolgirl
and a 15-year-old from Jerusalem, whose father had been injured
in a petrol bomb ten years earlier. The perpetrator was later
identified as a 25-year-old Arab from a refugee camp. He was
hospitalised and subsequently convicted of murder, hijacking and
terrorism. What happened prompted immense anger in Israel, with
a number of retaliatory incidents, which Prime Minister Yitzhak
Shamir condemned as