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| By Associated Press April 19, 2005 |
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A prominent Israeli human rights group has asked the country's Prisons Service to reverse its ban on allowing the convicted assassin of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to marry in jail, a spokesman for the group said Monday.
Yaov Leff of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel said the group had sent the legal adviser of the Prisons Service a letter asking him to permit the marriage of Yigal Amir to Larisa Trimbobler, a divorced mother of four who fell in love with Amir while he was in prison.
"We asked that the Prisons Service adviser order the appropriate authorities to let Yigal Amir and Larisa Trimbobler be allowed to exercise their basic human right and get married in prison," he said.
The Prisons Service did not return a message seeking comment.
Leff said that Amir has asked the human rights group to represent him, despite the large gap between Amir's extreme nationalist views and its liberal ideology.
"He asked us to represent him and we agreed," Leff said. "We think the issue here revolves around a fundamental human right that extends even to people who are serving time in prison."
Amir was convicted for killing Rabin at a November 1995 peace rally in Tel Aviv and sentenced to life in prison. He said he carried out the act to stop the handover of land in Israeli-Palestinian peace deals. The assassination was a major blow to peace efforts.
Trimbobler and Amir, both Orthodox Jews, insist they were married secretly over the phone by a rabbi last year. But other rabbis and prison officials dispute the claim, saying the wedding was not valid under Jewish law because Amir was not joined by two witnesses.
In March, the Israeli Supreme Court turned down a request by Amir to allow him to have conjugal visits.
In its ruling, which upheld a lower court decision, the court said that Amir has not abandoned his violent aims, has shown no remorse and has become a role model for extremists. It also said it would be difficult to supervise the conjugal visits.
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