A PALESTINIAN construction worker rampaged in a bulldozer along one of west Jerusalem`s busiest streets, killing three Israelis as he crushed cars and overturned a bus before being shot dead.
There was no claim of responsibility from militant groups and police said they were trying to establish if 30-year-old Hosam Dwayyat had acted alone.
Dwayyat drove the 20-tonne earthmoving vehicle for 500m along Jaffa Road, rolling over cars, crushing some occupants, and ramming into a crowded number 13 bus, flipping it on its side with his mechanical shovel.
Dramatic television footage showed the vehicle later at a standstill and a policeman in the cab, as rescue workers and passersby surveyed the wreckage. However, the bulldozer started moving again and a struggle could be seen inside the cab.
A man in civilian clothes leapt aboard and fired a pistol into the cab, followed by a helmeted policeman in body armour who fired an automatic rifle. The officer later said he fired twice at the wounded driver to ensure he was no further threat.
"The only way to stop him was with a bullet to the head," witness Moshe Oren said afterwards. "We were relieved."
Medical officials said more than 40 people were taken to hospital. Police at first identified the dead as two Israeli men and a woman, but then corrected this to one man and two women.
Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev said the attack "was an act of senseless, murderous violence".
At the Dwayyat family home in the Arab east of the city, there was no sign of the crowds and banners that normally accompany the funerals of Palestinian guerrillas.
Neighbours and relatives, including an uncle, said Dwayyat was divorced from a Jewish Israeli.
Police said he had a history of drug offences but no known political affiliation.
It was the first Arab attack in Jewish west Jerusalem since a gunman killed eight students on March 6 at a rabbinical seminary a short distance from Jaffa Road.
The scene in the aftermath of the incident was reminiscent of suicide bombings that destroyed buses on Jaffa Road during a wave of attacks in 1996 and during the first years of a Palestinian uprising that began in 2000.
Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said in Gaza his group did not expect the attack to "influence the Gaza calm".
Hamas`s allies, Islamic Jihad, said in a statement: "The Jerusalem Brigades bless the heroic operation in Jerusalem as the natural reaction to the crimes of the occupation."
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