Last update - 00:00 27/06/2007
Cabinet may send 4 Jordanians home to serve prison sentences
By Barak Ravid, Haaretz Correspondent and The Associated Press
The Cabinet is to consider a proposal to send four Jordanians home
to serve out their life prison terms for 1990 cross-border attacks, Prime
Minister Ehud Olmert's office said Wednesday in a statement.
The proposal, filed by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, Justice Minister Daniel Friedmann, and Public Security Minister Avi Dichter, will be put before the Cabinet on Sunday, the statement said. It is expected to be approved.
Three of the armed men, who were Jordanian policemen, infiltrated Israel from Jordan in November 1990, sparking a firefight that killed IDF Capt. Yehuda Lifshitz. The other killed Sgt. Pinchas Levy.
Representatives from the justice ministry contacted both families and notified them that the issue of releasing the prisoners would come up in the next cabinet meeting. The representatives offered to relay the families' opinions on the matter in writing to the ministers.
In the proposal, the ministers wrote that the decision would symbolize a gesture to Jordan. "There is no change in other governmental decisions regarding the release of other security prisoners, and the decision has nothing to do with releasing Palestinian or other prisoners," the proposal read.
Former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had agreed to release Jordanian prisoners- ten prisoners were freed in the "Tennenbaum deal" with Hezbollah, and another seven were released in April 2005. Sharon opposed releasing prisoners with "blood on their hands," and rejected Jordan's repeating request to free the four Jordanians, one of them being a brother of a Jordanian parliament member.
In February, Olmert said he had accepted a request from King Abdullah II of Jordan to send the four back to Jordan, where they would serve out their prison sentences. At the time, a Jordanian official said legal issues still had to be worked out.