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Carmi Gillon, former head of the Shin Bet. Earlier this week he said Yigal Amir should have been shot down "like a dog."
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| By Israel Insider staff and partners November 5, 2005 |
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Part Two in a Four-Part Series. Click here for Parts 1, 3, and 4.
Exactly 10 years after Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated, officials responsible for his security at the time are calling for a new inquiry into intelligence and security failures leading up to the killing.
Dror Yitzhaki, who headed the Shin Bet internal security services' bodyguard unit at the time, brushed off conspiracy theories that assassin Yigal Amir was not the lone gunman. But his call for a new inquiry will almost certainly fuel far-right activists who have long called for another investigation.
Amir, an ultranationalist Jew who opposed Rabin's moves to exchange land for peace, fired shots widely believed to have killed the Israeli leader on Nov. 4, 1995 after a peace rally in Tel Aviv.
In his first interview since the assassination, Yitzhaki said that he took responsibility for the failure of Rabin's bodyguards to prevent the killing, including "the activity of the security guards who had been trained for years ... that the second bullet -- if not the first -- would be theirs."
In his first interview since the assassination, the man in charge of Rabin's security the night he was killed called for a new inquiry into the killing, saying key questions remain unanswered.
The bodyguards did not fire a single shot, and Amir was arrested on the spot.
Yitzhaki was particularly incensed about the use of Jewish agents to provoke outrage against the right wing, such as the "Eyal" organization set up by the agent known as "Champagne," Avishai Raviv. Raviv recalled calling up Shin Bet colleagues in the "Jewish Department" after he saw a televised swearing-in ceremony at a cemetery involving extremists vowing violent action. He was told not to worry: "They're all ours."
Five months before the killing, a sergeant from the army's intelligence unit overheard a conversation in a public restroom about a "little Yemenite guy" who had a handgun and had serious intentions to kill Rabin. But that information was never passed along, said Yitzhaki, who resigned after the assassination. Amir's family immigrated from Yemen.
"I received no intelligence except for general assessment paperwork," he added.
Because questions remain about the events leading up to the assassination, Yitzhaki said he wonders "whether there is room to set up another state inquiry to investigate the truth."
Amir was sentenced to life in prison and has become an icon for some hardline Israelis who oppose the establishment of a Palestinian state on land Israel has occupied since the 1967 Mideast war.
Excerpts from Yitzhaki's interview were broadcast Thursday on Israel TV Channel Two. The full interview is to be broadcast later Friday, the 10-year anniversary of Rabin's death.
Top cop at rally criticizes Shin Bet
In an interview with The Jerusalem Post, Lt.-Cmdr. (ret.) Ya'acov Shoval, who commanded the police at the fatal 1995 peace rally, lashed out at the Shin Bet, accusing it of not updating him prior to the rally about warnings of the possibility a Jewish extremist might try to attack the prime minister.
"When I heard about the warnings, I felt as if I was a policeman with the Palestinian Authority's police force," he said. "I had close to 1,000 cops under my command, and had we been informed, I can't say we could have prevented the murder, but we would have noticed more."
Recalling the events of that fateful night, Shoval said he stood with Rabin as he prepared to enter his waiting car seconds before he was shot.
"We came down the steps together and I turned to look at the crowd in the other direction, with my back to [assassin Yigal] Amir," he recalled. "Then there were shots and, together with two other policemen, I jumped on Amir and he yelled out, 'I am a Jew. I am a Jew.'"
Shoval dismissed conspiracy theories which claim Amir was not the real murderer and that he really fired blanks at Rabin. "I can say for certain that Amir was the person who shot Rabin," he said. "An hour and a half after the shooting, I went back to headquarters and Amir, who didn't know yet that Rabin had died, was there and I told him, 'You could have killed him.' He said, 'I wish I had.'"
Shoval took issue with former Shin Bet chief Carmi Gillon, who told the press this week that his security men should have shot and killed Amir following the shooting "like a dog." Gillon had previously cast aspersions on Dror Yitzhaki for operational failures.
"Gillon is wrong," he said. "It was better that Amir stayed alive. This way the investigation was able to proceed smoothly, and the public was not able to come up with ideas about a Jewish underground behind the murder. With Amir alive, we know he acted alone and was not part of a movement."
The AP contributed to this report.
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