Last update - 00:00 23/10/2007
Yigal Amir tells how he murdered Rabin in investigation cassette
By Jonathan Lis, Haaretz Correspondent
Dalia Rabin received a video cassette from the police Monday of the initial investigation of Yigal Amir, who assassinated her father, prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, 12 years ago Wednesday, according the the Jewish calendar.
"I decided to kill him, to neutralize him politically...heaven forbid, I don't regret it," Amir says in the cassette, at his first police interrogation after the murder on November 4, 1995.
Amir, who was loitering near Rabin's car after the demonstration that night, explains that he decided not to shoot then foreign minister Shimon Peres, who came down the steps at Kikar Malchei Yisrael a few minutes before Rabin, because he was merely a "secondary target."
"Afterward Rabin came down accompanied by security men. I approached him before he entered his car, fired three bullets at him and then the security men jumped on me and I threw down the gun," Amir says.
Commissioner David Cohen presented Rabin with the cassette during a meeting of police top brass at the Yitzhak Rabin Center for Israel Studies, to mark the anniversary of the assassination.
"The national trauma enveloping us since the prime minister was murdered, with the intention of blocking a political move, will haunt the Israeli nation for generations," Cohen said.
"Every policeman can strengthen democracy every day in situations that require his judgment to choose between one option and another. At this moment, he should choose the democratic option," he said.
Cohen said "the violence Yitzhak Rabin spoke about in his last words, when he said it undermined the foundations of democracy, is the challenge you are dealing with."