An American-born Jewish settler suspected of committing hate crimes and two murders was arrested by Israeli security and elite police, officials said.

Yaakov "Jack" Teitel, a 37-year-old father of four from the West Bank settlement Shvut Rachel, was arrested Oct. 7, the Israel Security Agency revealed in details released after a gag order concerning the case was lifted Sunday evening.

Security officials said Teitel perpetrated a variety of attacks over a number of years, including the murder of an Arab taxi driver in Jerusalem in June 1997 while he was visiting Israel as a tourist. He also confessed to murdering a Palestinian shepherd near the south Hebron community Carmel in August the same year, officials said.

He revealed he smuggled the pistol used in the two murders into Israel on board a British Airways flight, officials said. After committing the two murders, Teitel left Israel for Florida, and returned in 2000, ISA officials said.

He confessed to stabbing an Arab in Jerusalem in 1997, planting four foot mines in an Arab village outside of Jerusalem in 2001, and placing a pipe bomb in the yard of a Palestinian family in the West Bank village of Sinjil in March 2003, officials said.

Between the years 2006 to 2008, he planted bombs near a police station, on a road near a police patrol, and disguised a bomb as a gift which he sent to the home of a messianic family living in the West Bank city of Ariel, wounding a teenage youth who opened the gift causing the bomb to explode, officials said.

Teitel also admitted to placing a bomb at the entrance to the Jerusalem home of Professor Zeev Shternhall, who was seriously injured in the blast, in September 2008.

Security forces uncovered a weapons cache in the yard of his home containing six automatic machine guns and four pistols and rounds of ammunition, which he said he smuggled into Israel in a shipping container, officials said.