Militant's Claim that Arafat Can't End Attacks

AZA, June 5 — If there is one thing that the Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad does not fear, one of its leaders said today, it is the repressive force of Yasir Arafat and his Palestinian Authority.

"The Palestinian Authority is broken; its institutions are destroyed," the leader, Sheik Abdallah al-Shami, said calmly as he sat in the living room of his home here. "How can the Palestinian Authority assure the security of the Israelis when it cannot even protect its own people?"

On the other side of Israel, at Mr. Arafat's headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah, some of his aides were insisting that if they confirmed Islamic Jihad's involvement in the deadly attack on an Israeli intercity bus this morning, they would begin rounding up its members.

In an interview today, Mr. Shami offered such confirmation proudly. Other Islamic Jihad officials later said one of their militants from the West Bank town of Jenin, Hamzi Samudi, had pulled alongside the bus with his car and detonated his bomb, killing 17 passengers and injuring dozens.