Bodies of 2 U.S. bombing victims arrive in U.S.

El Al flight 001 rests on the tarmac at JFK airport in New York after carrying the bodies of Janis Ruth Coulter and Benjamin Blutstein from Israel to the United States.

NEW YORK (CNN) -- The bodies of two Americans killed Wednesday in a Hamas terrorist bombing at Hebrew University in Jerusalem arrived in New York on Friday morning.

An El Al jet landed at John F. Kennedy International Airport shortly before 6 a.m. bearing the bodies of Janis Ruth Coulter, 36, of Massachusetts, and Benjamin Blutstein, 25, of Pennsylvania.

They were among five Americans and two Israelis who were killed in the terror bombing. The bomb -- believed to have been hidden in a handbag and detonated by remote control -- also wounded more than 80 people when it exploded at lunchtime in the cafeteria of the Mount Scopus campus of Hebrew University. Police said there were about 100 people in the cafeteria at the time of the blast. (Full story)

Coulter was the assistant director of graduate studies for Hebrew University's Rothberg International School in New York.

She arrived in Israel the day before she was killed and was accompanying 19 American students who were to begin Hebrew University classes. She was killed while eating lunch with them in the cafeteria.

Yisrael Campbell Hochstrin, a friend of Benjamin Blutstein, kisses his coffin inside the cargo area of Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv before it was flown to New York.

Blutstein was in a two-year program to become a Jewish studies teacher and had planned to return home Thursday, officials said.

He lived in Susquehanna Township, Pennsylvania, and was attending Hebrew language classes at Hebrew University. He also was a musician, working as a deejay at discos in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Blutstein was killed the day before he planned to fly home to visit his family in Pennsylvania.

The other three Americans killed were identified as Marla Bennett, 24, of San Diego, California; Dina Carter, 37, a resident of Jerusalem; and David Gritz, 24, of Massachusetts, who also had French citizenship and had recently lived in Paris.

The two Israelis killed were David Diego Ladowski, 29, and Levina Shapira, 53, both from Jerusalem, according to Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The radical Islamic group Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack, saying it was in retaliation for an Israeli attack in Gaza last week that killed the commander of the Hamas military wing and 14 others.

Hamas, a Palestinian Islamic fundamentalist organization, has a military wing that has admitted responsibility for terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians and well as attacks against the Israeli military.