After Two Years, Archeologist's Murder Remains Unsolved

By Kurt Holden

Just before 3 p.m. on January 19, 1992, American archeologist Albert Ernest Glock parked his car on the street above his administrative assistant's house in Bir Zeit, 13 miles north of Jerusalem. As head of the Palestinian Institute of Archeology at Bir Zeit University in the occupied West Bank, he was a regular visitor.

Although the Palestinian university had been closed by Israeli occupation authorities throughout much of the intifada, faculty and staff members were working hard to provide reading assignments and instructional material, assess student papers, and keep research projects going without attracting Israeli attention. If they were found to be offering instruction, even informally in their own homes, foreign professors like Dr. Glock were subject to deportation, and Palestinians like his assistant and Bir Zeit students were subject to arrest, routine torture during interrogation, and up to six months' internment without any explanation or charges being filed.

Because the house was on a steep hillside, Dr. Glock had to open the gate beside his parked car and pick his way down a steep outside stairway leading to his assistant's front yard. As he descended the stairway he vanished from the sight of anyone in the houses on the street above.

No one in the assistant's house had heard the car stop in the street above. They heard two shots ring out, however, followed after a brief pause by a third shot. No one was alarmed because, after five years of living in a center of the Palestinian intifada, they were used to hearing shots fired in the neighborhood. However, one member of the family looked out the front door peephole just in time to see a masked man vanishing up the steep stairs to the street above.

Family members rushed to the door and opened it cautiously. They found Dr. Glock lying on his back on the doorstep, bleeding profusely. He had been shot twice from behind in the neck and back of his head at close range, and then apparently shot again in the heart from the front, while he was lying on the ground.

The area was under curfew, but there was a telephone in the assistant's house. She called immediately for assistance, but no ambulance arrived until two hours after the shooting. Dr. Glock was pronounced dead upon arrival at the hospital. It was another full hour before Israeli police arrived to investigate the murder.

Subsequently, witnesses on an adjacent hillside reported that at the top of the steps the masked assassin climbed into a white car and was driven away by two accomplices. The car bore yellow plates, indicating that it was registered to a resident of Israel or a Jewish settler in the West Bank, where cars registered to Palestinians have blue plates.

Glock, a 67-year-old ordained Lutheran minister, lived several miles from Bir Zeit in the village of Aram, four miles south of Jerusalem. He and his wife had come to the Holy Land 16 years earlier, in 1976. He had headed the Albright Institute of Archeology (formerly the American School for Oriental Research) in East Jerusalem before joining the Bir Zeit University faculty.

In both positions, according to Palestinian journalist Ghada Turjman, writing in the Jan. 27, 1992 Al Fajr, "he helped preserve Palestinian heritage, which is under constant threat of extinction due to the unending Israeli occupation.'' However, an Israeli police spokeswoman, Tami Paul Cohen, announced after a two-day investigation that there was no evidence the murder had anything to do with politics.

The killing of Idaho-born Professor Glock occurred at a particularly turbulent time. Eight days earlier, on Jan. 11, the El Bireh YMCA, where many Bir Zeit University students were staying, was raided by Israeli Border Guards. They beat YMCA staff members and smashed windows. At midnight on Jan. 14, armed Jewish settlers vandalized the home of Bir Zeit University Professor Riyad Malki in the presence of Israeli soldiers, who did not intervene.

On Jan. 16, just three hours after he submitted a visa request to the American consulate general to participate as a Palestinian delegate in Middle East peace talks in the United States, El Bireh YMCA counselor Mohammed Hourani was placed under "administrative detention." American colleagues of Dr. Glock had speculated that the step-up in official and unofficial Israeli violence was timed to provoke the Palestinian delegation into withdrawing from the Washington, DC talks.

Curfew, Raids and Arrests

After Dr. Glock's assassination, the Israeli army promised to lift the tight Ramallah-area curfew by noon on Jan. 22 to permit attendance at a 12:30 p.m. funeral service at the Lutheran church on the Mount of Olives in East Jerusalem. Instead they kept the area under curfew for the entire day and, in a series of lightning raids, took some 50 Palestinians from their homes in Ramallah, El Bireh and Bir Zeit to detention without formal charges.

Among those arrested were at least eight Bir Zeit University students and additional Bir Zeit staff members, including biochemistry Professor Jad Mikhail, engineering technician Adil Hidmi, student service staffer Ali Hassouna and architecture lecturer Khalil Abu Arafah. By design or coincidence, the arrests took place on the day peace delegation spokeswoman Hanan Ashrawi was scheduled to return to her home in nearby Ramallah from the peace talks.

The police investigators seemed to be following a theory that Dr. Glock's murderers were Palestinians opposed to the presence of foreigners on the campus of Bir Zeit University, or perhaps Palestinians who suspected him of being an American agent. There also was speculation that Islamists of the Hamas group killed him to disrupt the peace talks or to mark the first anniversary of the Gulf war.

Investigators pointed out, too, that the American archeologist's department had been involved in an internal university dispute over a personnel appointment which Dr. Glock initially had opposed. Asked to comment on whether Dr. Glock's opposition to the appointment could have been a factor in his death, a colleague pointed out that he had accepted the university administration's decision gracefully and already was working productively with the new appointee.

"Isn't that just the time an Israeli hit squad would choose?" the colleague asked. "His foreign colleagues would take it as an Israeli warning to clear out, but the authorities could assure journalists who don't know the circumstances that it was internal Palestinian politics."

In fact, Palestinian friends of Professor Glock declare flatly that the "professionalism" of the murder indicated it was the work of Israeli death squads seeking to frighten away foreigners who remained at Palestinian institutions throughout the intifada, thus acting as witnesses and a deterrent to Israeli violence against students. Colleagues pointed out that Israeli settlers on one occasion drove onto the Bir Zeit campus and randomly machine-gunned students, killing and wounding several.

To support the theory that the murder was the work of Israeli Defense Forces or Jewish settlers, academic colleagues cite the peculiar actions of Israeli police at the time of and after the murder. Wrote Dr. David McCreery, associate professor in the Religion Department at Willamette University in Salem, OR, and a former director of the American Center of Oriental Research in Amman, Jordan, in a letter to the Washington Report:

"If Glock was killed by Palestinians, wouldn't at least one group claim responsibility for the murder? Why did the Israeli police take so long to respond and what accounts for their lack of progress in the investigation? Normally, in a case like this, Israeli security forces are on the scene in . . . minutes, roads are sealed off, and numerous people are detained for questioning if there is a remote possibility that they were involved in the incident or had seen anything. None of these steps were taken. "

Professor Glock left three sons and a daughter, all living in the United States, and his widow, who remains in the West Bank. All have been reluctant to comment on the murder, pointing out that because his work required good relations with the Israeli authorities and with his Palestinian colleagues and students, Dr. Glock was determinedly non-political and kept to himself his thoughts on the military occupation and the political violence around him.

Friends report, however, that family members are increasingly disturbed at the Israeli government's apparent unwillingness to investigate the murder further.

Asked to comment on the unsolved murder of a U.S. citizen in the West Bank, the U. S. Consulate General in Jerusalem pointed out that there, as elsewhere in the world, U.S. consular personnel are dependent upon local authorities to carry out police investigations. With the Israeli investigation apparently closed, however, the question of "Who killed Professor Glock?" remains unanswered two years later.