by Our Foreign Desk

ISRAELI security service Shin Bet was interrogating the head of a Jewish extremist group yesterday about last week’s firebomb attack on a Palestinian family.

Shin Bet said Meir Ettinger was arrested late on Monday for “involvement in an extremist Jewish organisation.”

The agency would not say if he was also suspected in the July 31 arson attack that killed 18-month-old toddler Ali Dawabsheh and severely burnt his parents and four-year-old brother in the village of Duma near Nablus.

But two days before the attack, Shin Bet accused Mr Ettinger of leading a movement of young Israeli settlers accused of an arson attack on the Catholic Church of Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes on the Sea of Galilee.

Mr Ettinger has denied leading an extremist movement. His lawyer Yuval Zemer claimed on Israel’s Army Radio that authorities had arrested his client to appease an Israeli public outraged by the arson attack.

“There was no urgent need to arrest here, other than some kind of desire to show: ‘Here, we’re doing something, here, we’re arresting,’” said Mr Zemer. “Of course, what is better than the number one most wanted target?”

Israeli media have dubbed Mr Ettinger as Shin Bet’s “number one” most wanted Jewish extremist. He has been arrested several times before and banned from the West Bank.

He is also the grandson of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, an ultranationalist whose party was banned from Israel’s parliament for its racist views in 1988. Kahane was assassinated in 1990.