Last update - 00:00 15/01/2007
Prosecution asks IDF to strip ex-Hezbollah captive of officer rank
By Amos Harel, Haaretz Correspondent
The chief military prosecution on Monday asked the Israel Defense Forces to lower the rank of Colonel (res.) Elhanan Tennenbaum to private.
Tennenbaum was abducted in 2000 by Hezbollah guerillas when on a business trip in Dubai with an Israeli Arab associate. He admitted after his release in 2004 to having traveled abroad in order to pursue a drug deal.
His business associate, Taibeh resident Kais Obaid, was a Hezbollah operative.
Brigadier General Avihai Mandelblit, the chief prosecutor, asked the president of the Appeals Court, Major General Yishai Bar, to convene a judicial panel to rule on lowering Tennenbaum's rank in accordance with military law.
In his petition to the court, Mandelblit cited a long list of crimes to which Tennebaum had confessed, including drug dealing, fraud and forgery.
The judicial panel, which is headed by a retired justice, is authorized to lower the rank of an officer who confessed in a plea bargain or in an arrangement with the state to disgraceful crimes.
The retired IDF colonel had initially claimed that he had been abroad in an attempt to uncover information on the whereabouts of missing Israel Air Force navigator Ron Arad, who disappeared when his plane went down over Lebanon in 1986.
Tennenbaum was returned to Israel in January 2004, after more than three years in captivity. Under the terms of the prisoner exchange deal, Israel released hundreds of Arab and Palestinian prisoners in return for the bodies of three IDF soldiers and Tennenbaum.