Israeli Police Negligent in Case of Slain Arab, Family Charges

The family of a prominent Palestinian lawyer murdered in the driveway of his East Jerusalem home three months ago accused Israeli police Wednesday of negligence and double standards in their investigation of the crime.

Aziz Shehadeh, a well-known Arab moderate, was slashed to death by an unknown, knife-wielding assailant as he returned home from work last Dec. 2. Israeli officials have said they suspect it was a politically motivated assassination.

Raja Shehadeh, son of the slain man, said at a press conference Wednesday that he did not know what the motive was for his father’s murder. But he noted that like Nablus Mayor Zafer Masri, who was assassinated Sunday, his father had publicly endorsed the idea of Arabs taking over city administration on the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Motive Suggested

Two hard-line Palestinian groups claimed responsibility for Masri’s murder, branding him a traitor for accepting an Israeli appointment as mayor of the West Bank’s largest city last December.

“It is possible that those who opposed such moves wanted to make (Aziz Shehadeh) the first victim in a series of murders and that Zafer Masri was the second,” said Raja Shehadeh, who is a West Bank lawyer and co-founder of Law in the Service of Man, a human rights organization affiliated with the Geneva-based International Commission of Jurists.

The Shehadeh family had scheduled the press conference last week, before Masri’s murder.

Repeated Assurances

The younger Shehadeh said relatives have been silent until now about what they see as negligent police work in the investigation of his father’s death because of repeated assurances by high Israeli officials that they were doing all in their power to find the murderer.

“We now believe that this confidence was misplaced and that we have been misled throughout the investigation as to the actual progress made,” he said. “For sure the police are guilty of inefficiency, of negligence.”

Police spokesman Rafi Levi denied Shehadeh’s accusations. He said police have questioned 17 suspects, several of whom are still being held. He said investigators have looked into the possibilities of both political and criminal motives, but added that so far there has been no break in the case.

‘Token Measures’

Shehadeh charged that the police were slow to arrive at the crime scene, took only “token measures” to seal off the area and search for the assailant, and were slipshod in their investigating techniques.

He said, for example, that they failed to conduct forensic tests and to properly pursue neighbors’ reports of having seen a suspicious man near the attorney’s home a few days before the killing.

“This contrasts sharply with the behavior of the authorities when an Israeli is the victim of violence,” Shehadeh said.

He pointed to the killing less than a year ago of an Israeli settler in Ramallah, just north of Jerusalem and the site of his family’s law practice.

Curfew Imposed

In that case, the authorities imposed a one-week curfew on the entire town and sealed several businesses near the murder site for several more days after their owners failed, in the army’s view, to adequately cooperate in the investigation.

Israel considers an attack on Jewish soldiers or civilians on the West Bank to be a state security threat, while the murder of a Palestinian is generally handled as a normal criminal act.