Assassinations Israel

Israel wrestled Wednesday with the wisdom of cross-border assassination after the killing of a Lebanese Shiite militia leader was followed by the heaviest rocket attack on Israel's northern communities in more than a year.

A young woman who was a friend of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's murderer was convicted Sunday of knowing of the killer's intentions and failing to inform the police. Margalit Har-Shefi, 22, acknowledged Yigal Amir boasted to her that he was planning to assassinate Rabin in order to stop the peace process and the handing over of land to the Palestinians. But she told the Tel Aviv Magistrates Court that she did not believe Amir intended to kill Rabin.

The master bomb maker for the militant wing of Hamas was killed by fellow members of the Islamic group in an internal power struggle, Palestinian officials declared Monday, exonerating Israel of involvement in his death. An investigating committee has identified the killer and some of the accomplices in the death of Mohiedin Sharif, said Nabil Shaath, a Palestinian Authority Cabinet minister and peace negotiator. "They are people inside Hamas.

An informer for Israel's intelligence agency who befriended Yitzhak Rabin's assassin will be indicted on charges he failed to stop the killing, Israel's attorney general said Wednesday. The announcement by Atty. Gen. Elyakim Rubinstein came exactly three years after Jewish ultranationalist Yigal Amir shot and killed the prime minister as he was leaving a peace rally in Tel Aviv. Rubinstein identified the suspect as Avishai Raviv, once an informer for the Shin Bet security services.

Three teenage girls who shocked the country by boasting about their admiration for the man who assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin apologized and sent letters of regret to Rabin's widow, Leah. "I am sorry about everything," Merav Hazan was quoted as saying by the Yediot Aharonot newspaper. "I don't support Rabin's murder." The girls, all age 17, had gone to see Yigal Amir during his trial for Rabin's killing. Amir, 26, is serving a life sentence for murder.

He has dark, curly hair, deep brown eyes and a mysterious smile, all of which add to his allure as a heartthrob. But the poster boy is not a television star or a rock idol. He is 26-year-old Yigal Amir, the unrepentant killer of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin now serving a life sentence.

The Supreme Court rejected an appeal by assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's killer, Yigal Amir, saying his lawyers' theory about a second gunman was "rooted in fantasy." Amir, in the 12th day of a hunger strike to protest prison conditions in Beersheba, did not travel to Jerusalem for the hearing, the first he has missed since his arrest.

Hagai Amir, accused of helping plot Yitzhak Rabin's murder, told an Israeli court Wednesday that he gave a false confession because he wanted to spend life in prison with his brother Yigal, who shot the prime minister. Hagai and Yigal Amir are standing trial--along with a third suspect, Dror Adani--on charges of conspiring to assassinate Rabin in order to halt Middle East peace moves. Another court has already convicted Yigal of murder. "I lived with him in the same room for 26 years.

In an unusual courtroom twist, a judge on Thursday ordered Yitzhak Rabin's confessed assassin to undergo a psychiatric evaluation, even though neither the defense nor the prosecution had requested it. The defense has never tried to argue that defendant Yigal Amir was insane when he shot the prime minister in November after a rally. But neither Amir nor his attorney objected to Judge Edmond Levy's request for an evaluation.

Yitzhak Rabin's convicted assassin said Sunday that he is happy the prime minister is dead, and suggested that killing him convinced Israelis to vote Rabin's Labor Party out of government. Yigal Amir, dressed in brown prison fatigues and a black skullcap, sat amid six police officers as his lawyers appealed a lower court's sentence of life in prison for Rabin's murder plus six years for wounding a bodyguard. "I am not sorry he is dead," Amir told the Supreme Court.