Police Say Gunman Also Targeted Peres

Israeli police on Sunday said the gunman who shot Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin also planned to kill Shimon Peres at a rally Saturday night in Tel Aviv. Peres escaped because he left the rally just before Rabin, not with him; the assassin reportedly chose to wait to target the prime minister.

“If both had left together, Rabin and Peres, he would have shot at both of them,” said Police Minister Moshe Shahai.

Police arrested Yigal Amir, 25, a right-wing, third-year student of law and computer science at Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv. Amir was active in establishing illegal Jewish settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Israeli news accounts published Sunday said police had found among Amir’s belongings copies of Frederick Forsythe’s “Day of the Jackal,” a novel of an assassination attempt on Charles de Gaulle, and of a biography of Baruch Goldstein, an American-born Jewish settler who gunned down 29 Muslims praying in Hebron last year.