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Avishai Raviv, accused of knowing of Yigal Amir's intentions to assassinate PM Yitzhak Rabin and not doing anything to prevent the murder.
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| By Ellis Shuman November 1, 2001 |
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The trial of former General Security Service (GSS) agent provocateur Avishai Raviv has been postponed until April 2002, to give his attorneys time to petition the High Court of Justice for the right to review the GSS's evidence in the case. The trial was originally scheduled to open on November 4, six years after the assassination of former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Raviv is accused of allegedly knowing of Yigal Amir's intentions and doing nothing to prevent the murder.
A three-judge panel of Jerusalem Magistrate's Court postponed for the eighth time the start of the trial after Raviv petitioned to allow him, and his lawyers, to review GSS evidence collected against him, despite the fact that some of the material is classified, due to security considerations. Raviv also asked the court to allow the introduction of additional evidence.
In their decision to delay the trial until April, justices Amnon
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"There are those that don't want the trial to take place."
- MK Zevulun Orlev
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Cohen, Orit Efal-Gabai and Aryeh Romanov stated that "the indictment [against Raviv] was presented on April 25, 1999, and that the accused had yet to respond to it." The judges ruled that the case was not yet ready for trial, and deferred to the High Court of Justice to issue a preliminary ruling on Raviv's petition.
The repeated delays of Raviv's trial provoked a strong reaction from MK Michael Eitan (Likud). He charged that "the defense doesn't want a conviction, and the prosecution is not interested in conducting a trial that would reveal the failures of everyone connected to operating Raviv."
MK Zevulun Orlev (National Religious Party) claimed that the "postponement is causing a deepening lack of trust between the national religious public and the judicial authorities. Every first grader realizes that the postponement was not given because of professional reasons. There are those that don't want it (the trial) to take place, and it appears that the dark mysteries connected to Rabin's assassination will never be exposed to the world," he said.
The current cover story of Jewsweek explores the role played by the GSS in the Rabin assassination and publishes evidence supporting claims of a conspiracy to murder the Prime Minister.
Prosecutors Irit Sone and Moshe Shiloh denied charges that they are being subjected to political pressure to delay opening the case, and stated that the indictment had been based on independent, professional grounds, Ha'aretz reported.
Raviv's case more complicated than that of Har-Shefi
Raviv is accused of having known of Amir's intentions to assassinate Rabin and doing nothing to prevent the murder. Margalit Har-Shefi was tried and convicted of a similar offense. President Moshe Katsav commuted the sentence and Har-Shefi was released from prison in August after serving two-thirds of a nine-month sentence.
Har-Shefi's imprisonment was accompanied by a public outcry from the national religious camp, partially because they believed that she was innocent, but also because Raviv and his operators had managed to evade trial.
Due to Raviv's position in the GSS in the years preceding Rabin's assassination, his case is more complicated than that of Har-Shefi. Many of the facts of the case have been withheld from the public, allegedly because of state security considerations. In media reports, Raviv has been accused of committing perjury at the trial of Hagai Amir (Yigal's brother), misleading an Israeli television report on the activities of the radical right-wing group Eyal, distributing a poster of Rabin in an SS uniform and of harassing the Rabin family. These accusations have been raised but it is not clear if they would play a part in Raviv's trial.
More essential to the charges against him is Raviv's connection with Yigal Amir, and whether Raviv reported Amir's intentions to his superiors in the GSS.
According to information made public in March, Avishai Raviv claims that he told his superiors in the GSS about Amir's intentions to attack Arabs, but they did nothing to prevent these actions. In addition, Raviv charges that other agents in the GSS knew of Amir's intentions to assassinate the prime minister, but were "prevented" from reporting this information. No details were published clarifying who else was involved with Amir or why information about his intentions was not reported.
Raviv has claimed, similar to Har-Shefi, that though he had heard Amir say that Rabin should be murdered, he never imagined that Amir was serious about acting on his intentions, and therefore did not take actions to report what he had heard.
The delays in starting Raviv's trial, attributed publicly to providing time for Raviv to access relevant documents, are suspected by some to be attributed to the reluctance of the GSS to allow additional information to be made public.
"Opposition to bringing Raviv to trial has come first and foremost from the ranks of the secret service itself, on the ridiculous grounds that the trial will expose the methods it uses to penetrate and operate agents in general, and among extreme right-wing Jewish organizations in particular," wrote Uri Dan in the Jerusalem Post in October 1999.
Sources familiar with Raviv's case believe that at some stage prosecutors will seek a plea bargain agreement to prevent the exposure of GSS operating methods in the courtroom, Yediot Aharonot reported yesterday.
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