Victim had survived earlier bombing

JERUSALEM -- After Arkady Wieselman narrowly escaped Israel's deadliest suicide bombing by walking out of a hotel dining room moments before a blast killed 29 people, he phoned his family to say his survival was a miracle.

After Sunday's blast in the vegetable market in Wieselman's home city of Netanya, his family's phone was silent.

Nearly two months after surviving the suicide blast at the hotel, Wieselman, along with two other Israelis, was killed in the city's market by a suicide bomber dressed like a soldier.

Moments before his death, Wieselman had phoned his wife, Victoria, to say he was on his way home.

When she tried to phone him back after she heard about the bombing, there was no answer.

"Arkady always said: "We were so lucky. God loved us.' So here now God took him," Wieselman's colleague Pinchas Zevulonova told the newspaper Yediot Ahronot.

Wieselman, a chef at the Park Hotel, had helped prepare a traditional Passover meal on March 27 when a suicide bomber wearing 40 pounds of explosives walked into the packed dining hall.

Just before the bomber blew himself up, Wieselman had left the dining room to get something from the kitchen's freezer.

After the blast, Wieselman phoned his family and told them: "I was saved by a miracle," Yediot Ahronot reported.

"On the eve of Passover, we were saved by a miracle," Zevulonova said. "Since then we have not stopped talking about this miracle and the security situation."

Hotel manager Rina Hamamy said she arrived at the scene five minutes after the dining room explosion to find Wieselman tending to the injured.

"He helped save the people. I thought it was impossible that something like this would happen again to the people at the hotel," she said.

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