Last update - 00:00 15/10/2006
Arab rights group: Suspend State Prosecutor over riot probe
By Yoav Stern, Haaretz Correspondent, and Haaretz Service
An Israeli Arab rights group demanded Sunday that State Prosecutor Eran Shendar be suspended from his post, charging that he was responsible for what the group called the failure to promptly investigate the killings of five Arab citizens by police gunfire during rioting in October 2000.
At the time of the rioting in Arab towns in the north, Shendar headed the Justice Ministry's Police Investigation Department (PID), which, according to Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, did not collect sufficient evidence immediately after the killings.
The group made the charge against Shendar in a report it released on Sunday. Thirteen people were killed in the rioting, 12 of them Israeli Arabs.
According to Adalah, the PID misrepresented evidence and collaborated with the police who were under investigation.
Hassan Asleh, spokesman for the Committee of Bereaved Families (of those killed in the riots) and father of Asil Asleh, a teen killed in the violence, said Sunday that "The Israeli regime resembles the dark regime of Germany."
Asleh said that Israel's leadership has failed to read history, which he said proves that peoples who rise up in rebellion, triumph.
In a reference to Haim Ramon, who resigned as justice minister after he was indicted for alleged sexual harassment, and to President Moshe Katsav,under investigation for alleged sexual assault, Asleh said, "If you sacked your justice minister over a kiss, and you investigate your president for sexual harassment, how can you not make a reckoning with the the murders of our children?"
The report is to be submitted to Attorney General Menachem Mazuz. Adalah is demanding that Mazuz open an immediate investigation into the activities of the PID.
According to Adalah, one of the reasons behind the lack of indictments in the case is the fact that the PID did not collect relevant evidence immediately following the events.
"We blame the entire justice system for this [failure]," Adalah said.
Adalah has charged that PID ignored the Or Commission's recommendations by failing to investigate the deaths of five of the 13 Arabs killed in the riots. It added that even in the cases the PID did investigate, it did not do enough to find the guilty parties.