Israel arrests suspects of Holocaust museum attack

    Israeli police arrested three Jewish men suspected of spraying graffiti thanking Hitler for the Holocaust at Jerusalem's Yad Vashem Holocaust museum earlier this month, a spokesman said on Tuesday.

"Israeli police arrested three male suspects, all three from the ultra-Orthodox sector," police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told AFP, adding that they were from Jerusalem, Ashdod and Bnei Brak, and aged 18, 26 and 37.

"The suspects were questioned in connection with the graffiti in Yad Vashem, and admitted to carrying out the incident, as well as other similar incidents in Jerusalem's Ammunition Hill and a memorial in the Jordan Valley," he said.

On 11 June, Hebrew graffiti thanking Hitler for the Holocaust and denouncing Zionism was found sprayed at Yad Vashem.

"Thank you Hitler for your wonderful Holocaust that you arranged for us, it's only because of you that we got a state at the UN," read one of 10 slogans daubed on walls at the museum, sparking shock in the Jewish state which came into being just three years after the end of World War II.

Other slogans read "The Zionist leadership wanted the Holocaust" and "If Hitler hadn't existed, the Zionists would have invented him."

Suspicion had fallen on extreme ultra-Orthodox opponents of the state of Israel.

Several ultra-Orthodox groups do not believe a Jewish state should exist without the appearance of the Messiah, of which the best-known is Neturei Karta. Rosenfeld said all three suspects were members of that group.

Similar slogans were sprayed in April at Ammunition Hill, a former Jordanian military post that now houses preserved trenches, battle fortifications and a museum, and at a memorial for Israeli fallen soldiers and policemen in the West Bank's Jordan Valley.

Rosenfeld said the three suspects would be brought to the Jerusalem magistrate's court for a remand hearing later on Tuesday.