ISRAEL SECURITY SERVICES DENIES U.S. CITIZEN LEGAL RIGHTS

Israeljustice.com

  JERUSALEM -- Israel's secret security services have denied a Jewish American citizen his legal rights to meet with an attorney since his arrest a week ago.  
    Israel's Security Services [Shabak] arrested Y.T on Oct. 7 in an apartment in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Har Nof but security forces have denied both legal and family access to him.  
    A gag order was clamped on the arrest for 21 days but Israeli publications published details which were later removed from internet sites.  
    According to reports on the Hareidi website "Hadrei Hareidim" or "Rooms for Hareidim," Y. T., 36, a U.S. citizen and former marine, barricaded himself in the Jerusalem apartment. Security forces broke down the door and found several explosives in the apartment which they later detonated.  
    Y. T., married and a father of four, is a resident of the Jewish community of Shvut Rahel in northern Samaria. The website also reported police found four M16 rifles in his apartment in Shvut Rahel.  
    On Oct. 12, a Petah Tikva Magistrates Court in central Israel remanded Y. T. for another three days despite the fact that he had not met his attorney.  
    "Everything is classified," defense attorney Adi Kedar said. "I don't know anything. The case has even been to the Supreme Court. The judges know but I don't know anything [about the evidence or the charges]."  
    The hareidi website reported that as early as the first remand hearing in Petah Tikva, the magistrate told Kedar not to appeal the remand extension of his client.  
    "Don't try to appeal," the hareidi website quoted the judge as saying, "because until now there hasn't been a case with so much clear evidence that links the suspect to the serious acts that he committed."  
    In earlier reports published in the Israeli media, correspondents said that Y. T. was suspected of setting the pipe bomb outside the home of Prof. Zeev Sternhell in Sept. 2008 in which the professor was lightly wounded. They also said that he was suspected of involvement in the shooting spree in a Tel Aviv gay youth bar that left two dead and 10 injured in August.  
    "They have accused him [Y. T.] of every [unsolved] murder [in the State of Israel] from [Haim] Arlosorov [in June 1933] to the murder in the gay bar," Shmuel Meidad, head of the Honeinu Legal Aid Organization, said. "They even reported that he confessed but [defense attorney] Adi Kedar or any one else has not met with him."  
    Military historian Aryeh Yitzhaki has assessed that reports of Jewish terrorists or new Jewish undergrounds are unleashed each year before October 29, the date of the memorial for former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin who was assassinated in November 1995.  
    "They've [security officials] accused him [Y. T.] of every unsolved murder that ever occurred," Yitzhaki said. "This time [the daily] Ma'ariv [newspaper] has crossed all lines when the correspondent presented the readers with all the unsolved cases of what he termed 'terror by Jews.' The Shabak decided that these are acts of settlers despite that fact that the police said they are examining all avenues of investigations. And of course, there are the draconian administrative expulsion orders."