Facebook post leads cops to nab Palestinian suspected of planning attack

Border Police officers arrested a Palestinian man suspected of planning a terror attack on Tuesday morning after he posted an apparent suicide message on Facebook, police said.

The man, identified by Palestinian media as Abd al-Rahman al-Jalis, was picked up in the Jalazoun refugee camp where he lives in the early hours of Tuesday morning.

“A post on social media, in which he made farewells to the world, raised the suspicion that the Palestinian… was going out carry out a terror attack in the Judea and Samaria region,” police said in a statement, using the Hebrew name for the West Bank.

A spokesperson for the Border Police said he could not comment on whether al-Jalis, who is in his 30s, was in possession of a weapon at the time of his arrest.

On a Facebook account with the same name and basic information as al-Jalis, a post was published on Saturday night in Arabic, reading: “Don’t bring flowers to my grave, the dead can’t smell.”

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=136618190311794&set=a.104719936834953.1073741828.100018908400730&type=3

A day later, there was another, misspelled post in which he said he “will certainly knock on heaven’s door with Jewish skulls someday.”

Al-Jalis was apparently aware of the attention his posts could bring him. Just after midnight, he wrote that he had not meant that he was planning to carry out an attack and that his posts were written out of grief for his cousin who died.

“Please don’t share [them] and help the occupation, like some ignorant folks have done,” he wrote.

Police said after his arrest that al-Jalis was questioned by the Shin Bet security service.