Wife of Yitzhak Rabin's killer says applying for a retrial
The wife of Yigal Amir, who was convicted of assassinating former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, announced on Saturday that she intends to apply for a retrial of the case.
“I would like to inform you that a defense team is currently being set up to prepare and file a request for a retrial for Yigal Amir,” Amir’s wife Larisa Trembovler wrote on Facebook after the close of Shabbat in Israel.
She added that Amir had given his consent to the fresh legal push and that a public relations campaign will be handled by a Swiss firm, although no details on the legal process will be given to the Israeli press.
Amir, now 47, is serving a life sentence and an additional 14 years in prison after he was found guilty of shooting the Labor prime minister to death at close range as he left a peace rally in Tel Aviv on November 4 1995. He was also found guilty of conspiracy to murder and the serious injury of Rabin’s bodyguard.
The assassination, amid a boiling political atmosphere that followed Rabin’s signing of a peace agreement with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, shocked the nation and drew almost unanimous revulsion.
Amir, a right wing activist, never expressed remorse for the slaying of Rabin and justified his actions using ‘Din Rodef’, a concept in Jewish law that allows in some cases murdering someone in order to prevent them killing others.
In 2001 the Israeli parliament passed a law that forbade a parole board from curtailing the sentence of someone convicted of murdering a prime minister.
Education minister and leader of the nationalist Jewish Home party, Naftali Bennett, tweeted in response to the news that “the murderer of a prime minister needs to end his days in prison.”
“There is no left or right on this issue. Every murderer is bad, but the murderer of a prime minister can undo the state,” he wrote.
Chairwoman of the left wing Meretz party, Zahava Gal-On, said in response that in place of a retrial of Amir, the “rabbis” she said were accomplices in the murder should stand trial.
“Yigal Amir said in his Shin Bet interrogation that without the backing of rabbis he would not have murdered Rabin, and these rabbis continue to walk freely and continue to incite," she wrote.
Russian-born Trembovler married Amir in 2004, and in 2007 she became pregnant after her husband was allowed to receive conjugal visits for the first time.