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ISRAEL

Suspicious note sent to Swedish mission in Israel

An envelope containing white powder was sent to the Swedish embassy in Tel Aviv on Tuesday, according to Israeli police.

Suspicious envelopes containing a white powder and notes were sent to the US, Spanish and Swedish embassies in Tel Aviv on Tuesday, police said, adding that there were no reports of anyone hurt.

“The embassy received a letter with white powder today,” Swedish foreign ministry spokesperson Camilla Åkesson-Lindblom told The Local in Stockholm.

“The embassy is temporarily closed and all non-essential staff have been sent home.”

Åkesson-Lindblom had no comment regarding possible threats against the Swedish mission in Israel. Nor could she say how long the embassy would remain closed.

Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said police were investigating the incident, and checking to see what the powder was. However, he said none of the embassy people appeared to have been harmed.

“Three separate envelopes were sent to three different embassies — the American, Spanish and Swedish — and in each they were opened by embassy staff who found a suspicious powder” he said.

Rosenfeld provided no details on the content of the notes or who might be behind the incident.

“A suspicious envelope was found and our security is working with the local police to sort it out,” US embassy spokesman Kurt Hoyer told AFP, without providing further details.

Letters containing a white powder have been considered a potential deadly threat since five people were killed in the United States when anthrax spores were mailed to some news media offices and US senators in the weeks following the September 11, 2001 attacks.

The FBI closed its investigation following the 2008 suicide of the main suspect, a researcher at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases.

Hoaxes, that became known as “white powder events,” became frequent following the anthrax attacks.

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ISRAEL

Former Israeli soldier attacked on Berlin street

A former Israeli soldier was attacked in the German capital Berlin, police said Saturday, with one or several unknown assailants spraying him with an irritant and throwing him to the ground.

Former Israeli soldier attacked on Berlin street
Israeli soldiers on operation near the Gaza Strip. Photo: dpa | Ilia Yefimovich

The 29-year-old was wearing a top with the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) logo when the attackers started harassing him on Friday about his religion, the police added, calling it “an anti-Semitic attack”.

Officers are seeking the assailants, who fled immediately after the attack, on suspicion of a politically-motivated crime.

Saturday is the second anniversary of an attack by a far-right gunman on a synagogue in the eastern German city of Halle, who killed two in a rampage when he failed to break into the house of worship.

It was one of a string of incidents that led authorities to declare the far right and neo-Nazis Germany’s top security threat.

Also this week, a musician claimed he was turned away from a hotel in eastern city Leipzig for wearing a Star-of-David pendant.

While the allegations prompted a fierce response from a Jewish community unsettled by increasing anti-Semitic crimes, several investigations have been mounted into contradictory accounts of the incident.

In 2019, police recorded 2,032 anti-Semitic crimes, an increase of 13 percent year-on-year.

“The threat is complex and comes from different directions” from jihadists to the far right, the federal government’s commissioner for the fight against anti-Semitism Felix Klein said recently.

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