Israel rejected 40 requests on murdered Briton
Palestine-Israel-UK, Politics, 4/20/2006

Britain's attorney general is to make a statement in response to requests to extradite and prosecute Israeli troops responsible for the killing of two UK journalists in 2003, Foreign Office Minister Lord Triesman has revealed.

Triesman said that Lord Goldsmith would make a "legal judgment" once he has studied a report from Coroner Andrew Reid, who presided over two separate inquests in London this month that ruled that both James Miller and Tom Hurnall had been "unlawfully killed." "We will decide on the next steps in relation to the Government of Israel only when the Attorney-General has been able to assess the coroner's findings and Ministers have discussed the cases with the families," he said during a parliamentary debate on Wednesday.

In the case of Miller, the Foreign Office minister revealed that the UK had made "40 interventions on the case with the Israelis at the ministerial and permanent undersecretary level in order to try to get them to cooperate fully" but without success.

After the inquest, family lawyers said the killing of Miller while holding a white flag breached the Geneva Convention and the jury's finding that the shooting was intentional put pressure on the UK government to act.

No one has been charged with killing the photojournalist, who was shot in the neck while making a film about Palestinian children in Rafah refugee camp in Gaza three years ago.

But during the inquest, his widow Sophey, who has traveled to the occupied Palestinian territories three times since the killing, named the Israeli who shot her husband as First Lieutenant Haib, who was commanding a unit at the time of the killing on May 2 in 2003.

Speaking in the debate in the House of Lords, the Liberal Democrat's Shadow Minister for International Development Baroness Northover called on the government to act on the the coroner's request in both cases under the 1957 Geneva Conventions.

The coroner, she said, asked for criminal proceeding to be considered in the UK "not only those who carried out these unlawful killings but those higher up the chain of command in the Israel Defense Forces and elsewhere who may have aided and abetted them." Former Liberal Democrat leader in the House of Lords, Baroness Williams urged the Attorney General to ensure that Israel reviews its rules of engagement given his commitment to international and national laws.

In the case of Hurndall, who was shot just a few weeks before Miller and only a kilometer away, his family has expressed dismay at the Israeli sentencing of former soldier Taysir Hayb to only eight years imprisonment for manslaughter rather than murder.

Their lawyer, Michael Mansfield, has urged the British government to take action which would lead to the extradition of senior Israeli commanding officers responsible for the killing.

"Make no mistake about it, the Israeli Defence Force has been found culpable by this jury of murder," Mansfield said after the inquest into Hurdnall's death found that he had been "intentionally killed."

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