The World - News from March 27, 1989

Israel’s Supreme Court ordered authorities to exhume the body of an Arab man who allegedly was beaten to death by Israeli soldiers. The order was issued in the case of Ibrahim Yasser Mator, 31, who died in an Israeli prison in October. At the time, the army said he committed suicide. Attorney Felicia Langer, representing the Mator family, called the court’s new ruling unprecedented. She quoted a military report as saying that Mator “hanged himself with his blanket on a sewage pipe . . . while his hands and legs were bound in plastic handcuffs.” She added that it said soldiers had injected the prisoner with Valium and morphine shortly before his death. “It is very unusual to commit suicide in that state,” she said.