Police Commander Yoram Levy and Superintendent Ruby Gilboa on Wednesday submitted their slander lawsuit against retired justice Vardi Zeiler, who headed the panel of inquiry into the alleged police misconduct during the probe of a 1999 murder, over his comments to Haaretz magazine and other media publications following the Zeiler Committee report.

Levy's lawyer, attorney Boaz Ben-Tzur, said in a letter to Zeiler last week that "Instead of clarifying the harmful things that you said at he press conference and apologizing for the damage done to Levy, you chose to repeat your slanderous remarks in the interview and heap more defamatory comments upon them."

According to Ben-Tzur, in the interview, Zeiler portrayed Levy as a former representative of the mafia.

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"You know well that Levy never served as a 'representative' of the Parinyan family or of any other person in the police. And if that isn't enough, during the interview you decided in an incomprehensible way to make public the content of the draft report that wasn't published, which you used in a world of unfounded imagery in order to defame Levy," Ben-Tzur wrote Zeiler.

"likening Levy to a 'harmful computer virus which destroys the system from within' and as a 'spy working in the service of the enemy' is an unacceptable act like no other. These words present a scathing violation of every legal and appropriate norm," Ben-Tzur added.

Ben-Tzur had warned Zeiler that he would be sued for defamation if he failed to retract his comments.