The grounds of the teachers' training college in the West Bank city of Ramallah have always been a meeting place for young Palestinian lovers, who can be spotted walking hand in hand along the paved pathways.
The benches under the pine trees are not an obvious contact point for those with more sinister intentions, and that's exactly why Abu Ahmed, a senior Hamas operative, chose this place to make his pitch.Abu Ahmed is the assumed name of this shadowy mastermind - who didn't even exist in the files of the Israeli intelligence services until two weeks ago.
The only two people who can identify him are Mohammed Abu Wardeh and Abed Rabbo Eid, the college students who agreed to work for Ahmed by recruiting three suicide bombers. Yet even Wardeh and Eid don't know the real name of the man who sat with them on a bench and whispered secret instructions in their ears.
Both Israeli and Palestinian security forces are now engaged in a manhunt for Ahmed. He told his disciples that he came from Gaza and belonged to Izzedin Kassam, the military arm of Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement.
Now his followers have told Palestinian police what they know.
Wardeh, who was arrested last week and has already been sentenced to life in Jericho jail, has confessed that Eid and he persuaded three students to volunteer for the suicide missions that have killed 58 people and injured more than 100 others.
One of the volunteers was Wardeh's cousin, Majdi, 20, who detonated 33 pounds of TNT on the No. 18 bus in Jerusalem. Half an hour later, the second volunteer, Ibrahim Sarahneh, 23, blew himself away next to a bus stop at the entrance to the Mediterranean city of Ashkelon.
Both men were from the same West Bank refugee camp of Al Fawwar, and each took care to make himself as inconspicuous as possible. Their preferred disguise was the dark green uniform of the Israeli army. To pass themselves off as teenage soldiers from the white Ashkenazi Jewish community, they wore earrings and dyed their hair blonde.
Abu Ahmed then instructed his two contacts in Ramallah to look for another "holy warrior."
This time the student selected was Raed Sharbuneh, 20, from the village of Burqah in the northern West Bank. His mission was to strike again at the No. 18 bus. Exactly a week after the first attacks, Sharbuneh, also dressed in Israeli military uniform, boarded the bus on Jaffa Street in Jerusalem. Minutes later he set off the explosives strapped round his waist, killing 18 passengers and wounding 12 more.
It was only after this third attack that Israeli security realized there was a common thread linking them with the teachers' training college.
This information was passed to Col. Jibril Rajoub, head of Palestinian security in the West Bank, who led a police raid on the college campus. Rajoub triumphantly informed his Israeli counterparts that the main suspects had been arrested and there was nothing more to fear.
But even as he reassured his Israeli friends, the telephones started to ring with news of yet another attack, this time in the heart of Tel Aviv. The two Ramallah suspects swore they had nothing to do with the Tel Aviv operation, which killed 14 and wounded more than 90.
They were telling the truth. Israeli police have concluded that the Tel Aviv carnage was the work of Islamic Jihad, the Gaza-based sister organization of Hamas. Its leaders also call for the destruction of the Jewish state.
Jihad's Damascus-based leader, Fathi Shkaki, was gunned down late last year in Malta by Israeli commandos, and the Tel Aviv bomb was intended to avenge Shkaki's death.
As panic-stricken Israelis reacted with shock and disbelief, President Yasser Arafat decided to make political capital out of the tragedies. Last Wednesday Rajoub invited Israeli television to interview Wardeh. Before the camera crew arrived in Jericho, Wardeh had been coached in the politically acceptable answers expected from him.
His most shocking "revelation" was that the Hamas operations were part of a political agenda to help the right-wing Likud opposition win the next general election. Likud and Hamas are equally opposed to the Oslo accords, although for different reasons. Likud believes the Labor-led Israeli government has risked the country's security by giving too many concessions to the Palestinians, and Hamas accuses Arafat of a sellout by agreeing to give up large parts of Palestine.
It was, by any measure, a poorly planned public relations stunt, and those Israelis who understand Arabic heard a different message from Wardeh when he was interviewed on Arafat's radio station, Voice of Palestine.
There he said that the true reason for the new wave of terror was to avenge the killing of the Hamas bomb-maker, Yehiya Ayash, also known as "The Engineer."
Ayash, 32, was responsible for an earlier series of suicide bombings which left more than 70 Israelis dead. After a two-year manhunt, he was killed in January after Israeli agents in Gaza booby-trapped his portable telephone.
The Ayash link to three of the four suicide bombs has been underlined by leaflets issued in the names of those who claim responsibility. They call themselves the "Students of Yehiya Ayash."
This, according to Israeli and Palestinian security sources, is a cell made up of between 70 and 80 Islamic activists who have taken on themselves the gruesome task of killing as many Jews as possible as retaliation for the death of their hero.
Hamas officials in Gaza said the Students of Ayash take orders only from Allah. "We as political leaders are not involved in military actions," says Hamas spokesman Mahmoud Zahar.
Before he was taken into custody on Friday, Zahar said, "The people who did these actions came from areas under Israeli occupation. You know I have no idea about the people involved in the suicide attacks, but I can say it is all the fault of the Israelis. It started after they killed Yehiya Ayash."
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)