Border Police officer indicted for shooting, killing Palestinian

A Border Police officer was charged Monday with the murder a Palestinian in the French Hill neighborhood of Jerusalem last November.

An Police Investigations Department (PID) inquiry revealed that officer Shmuel Yehezkel, 21, shot Samir Ribahi Dari in the back. The PID also refuted Yehezkel's claim that Dari, a resident of the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Isawiyah, had tried to run him down with his car.

PID investigators gathered testimonies from witnesses of the incident. The version of events they pieced together differed drastically from that presented by the Jerusalem Police.

Following the inquiry, police investigators said: "it appears the circumstances of the incident were unjustified."

"The claim that Dari attempted to run down the officer is groundless. Dari arrived at the scene after hearing his nephew was arrested by the police. He got out of his car in order to confront the officers. Later, he went back to his car and as he got further away, he was shot," a senior PID official said.

Dari was taken to Hadassah University Hospital, Mt. Scopus in Jerusalem. When his death became public, riots broke out among the dozens of Isawiyah residents waiting outside the hospital against the intention to transfer Dari's body to a forensics lab. The crowd attempted to break into the hospital, smashed car windows and set fire to other cars.

An autopsy on Dari body, performed at the Abu Kabir Forensic Medicine Institute, revealed Dari was shot in the back. The investigators later determined Dari was outside his car when he was shot, and therefore could not have attempted to run down the police officer.

"He was not in his car at the time of the shooting. He was far from the officers and there was no physical contact between the two sides at the time of the shooting," a PID source said, adding: "It's impossible that Dari tried to run over the officers because if he had done so, he would also have hurt his nephew, who was next to them."