( AP ) - The Israeli army on Wednesday said it arrested a Palestinian man accused in a deadly mob attack on two Israeli reservists in 2000, an incident that became an iconic image of violence and hatred at the start of the second Palestinian uprising.
Ayman Zaban was caught in an upscale neighborhood of the northern West Bank city of Nablus after Israeli military jeeps surrounded a building where he was sleeping, Palestinian officials said.
The attack took place in the West Bank city of Ramallah in the first weeks of Palestinian uprising. Two reservist soldiers, Cpl. Vadim Norjitz, 33, and Yossi Avrahami, 38, were on their way to their army base in the West Bank in October 2000 but took a wrong turn.
They ended up in Ramallah, were arrested and taken to a police station. There, an angry mob stormed the station and beat and stabbed the two Israelis to death.
Graphic pictures showed the crowd tossing the bodies out a second-story window and beating them with iron bars as they lay lifeless on the ground, and a Palestinian proudly holding up his bloodstained hands from the window.
Zaban belonged to the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, a violent offshoot of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah movement. A spokesman for the group said Zaban was not involved in the lynching.
Israel has arrested at least four other suspects in the killing. The daily Haaretz said Zaban was the last suspect in the mob attack who had not been caught.