Brooklyn Bridge killer finally admits he picked targets of 1994 attacks because they were Jewish

The cab driver who gunned down a group of Jewish students in New York 18 years ago has admitted the attack was racially motivated.



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 the Brooklyn bridge on March 1, 1994.

When originally quizzed by cops, Baz told them he started shooting because of a traffic disagreement.

Rashid Baz has admitted his shooting attack was racially motivated

Victim: Yeshiva student Ari Halberstam was gunned down in New York

He later confessed that he targeted his victims, following 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 told the New York Post.



Cops were always skeptical about Baz's defense but also poured cold water over rumors that he was part of a terrorism plot.

During a five-week trial, Baz’s lawyer claimed his client was suffering from post- traumatic stress disorder at the time of the killing.



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

He admitted tailing the van and targeting those inside 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 detectives, '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.



Scene of the 1995 Brooklyn Bridge shooting that killed Yeshiva student Ari Halberstam

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

Dr. Douglas Anderson - Baz's psychiatrist - testified at trial that Baz had attended a prayer service at the Islamic Society mosque following the massacre of 29 Palestinians by a Jewish doctor, Baruch Goldstein, in the West Bank city of Hebron.



Baz's friend, Moufaq Askar, recounted the sermon: 'According to Moufaq,' Anderson said, 'he heard the imam say that 'this takes the mask off the Jews. It shows them to be racist and fascist, as bad as the Nazis. Palestinians are suffering from the occupation and it's time to end it.'

Yakov Shapiro, second left, was a victim of the shooting attack on a van on New York's Brooklyn Bridge

Immediately following his conviction, Hamas and Hezbollah saluted Baz as a mujahid, a holy warrior.



When he went into the prison system, he was chosen by the Muslim chaplain to be his administrative clerk and elected as a leader of the prison mosque by the other Muslim inmates.



The southbound ramp on the Brooklyn Bridge was renamed the Ari Halberstam Ramp in 1995.



