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Ari Halberstam Killer Admits He Was Targeting Jews

NY Post

Rashid Baz Ym”s

The livery driver whose two-gun attack on a group of Hasidic students on the Brooklyn Bridge shocked the city 18 years ago has finally admitted that he targeted them because they were Jewish.

Rashid Baz was convicted in 1995 of murdering Yeshiva student Ari Halberstam, 16, and trying to kill more than a dozen others in a van with a hail of bullets he fired on a Manhattan approach to the bridge on March 1, 1994.

Baz initially told cops he opened fire because of a traffic dispute. But in 2007 Baz finally confessed that he targeted his victims, tailing their van for about two miles before the shooting, an admission that had never been made public until now.

Since Baz is already serving a minimum of 141 years in state prison, authorities believe there is no reason to pursue hate-crime or other new charges, law-enforcement sources said.

Detectives never believed Baz’s traffic-dispute defense but discounted the widely spread rumors that he was part of a terror-linked conspiracy.

During a five-week trial, Baz’s lawyer claimed the shooter suffered serious trauma while growing up during the Lebanese civil war and was suffering from post- traumatic stress disorder at the time of the slaying.

But in his confession years later, Baz said he first saw the van outside the Manhattan Eye and Ear Infirmary, on East 14th Street, where Lubavitcher spiritual leader Rabbi Menachem Schneerson was undergoing minor surgery.

He said he followed the van and targeted the occupants because of an earlier West Bank attack by Israeli settlers on Muslims. Asked if he would have shot at a van of black or Latino people, he told the investigators, “No, I only shot them because they were Jewish.”

Baz fired two guns, blowing out one of the windows of his blue Chevrolet. Then he drove calmly back to his car-service headquarters in Brooklyn and told co-workers he had shot up the van for no particular reason.

The other occupants of the van, including two who were critically wounded, survived.

A year later, the bridge’s southbound ramp was renamed the Ari Halberstam Ramp.

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7 Comments

  • Just Heard From Rebbe in Yirushalayim

    Our enemies are not afraid of the IDF. The IDF cannot even sleep peacefully. Our enemies are afraid of our *prayers*. Our enemies are *afraid of our cursing them*. Not the tanks that do not work. Or the missiles destroyed by falling off a IDF transport before being fired.

  • Rafael Shaul

    YEMACH SHMO, YOU STINKING ANIMAL, MAY YOU ROT IN JAIL TILL YOUR LAST USELESS BREATH. YOU ARE THE SCUM OF THIS WORLD. HASHEM WILL PUNISHING YOU IN JAIL – THAT’S THE EASY PART. WAIT TILL YOU DIE, THE FUN STUFF STARTS YEMACH SHMO IDIOT.

  • Jewish dude

    Why no hate crime? He even admit doing it. But i Jewish dude now that being Jewish is less important for the prosecutors.We want firearms to defend our self since the state will not do it. The police will not do it except fix tickets and eat donuts.

  • Unanswered Questions

    But the bigger, still unanswered question is whether his real intended target had been the Rebbe, and who else may have been involved in planning his attack and selecting his intended target.

  • Roberto H.

    No. # 1 … You’re both writing crazy illogical comments. No. 1…Are you insinuating that this Rebbe in Ir Hakodesh says that the IDF is not effective in combatting the enemies? Chabad thinks differently, dafka we must use all physical keilis down here on earth to at least start the process of defense and offence, then Hashem (the ultimate cavalary) will kick in full force.