"Police Suspected Of Fabricating Evidence In Attack On Jews"

[Shlomo]

These are the scum we are up against...
POLICE SUSPECTED OF FABRICATING EVIDENCE IN ATTACK ON JEWS
www.israeljustice.com/news2.asp?key=62

JERUSALEM -- Israeli police might have fabricated evidence to conceal an order to assault thousands of Jewish protesters in the West Bank.

An Israeli research center said a video released by police of a briefing to anti-riot forces in February 2006 was significantly revised. The video showed Cmdr. Yisrael Yitzhak, chief of the police in Judea and Samaria, brief his officers before they charged into a Jewish community of Amona and destroyed nine unlicensed homes.

"These are only suspicions, not charges," Yitzhak Klein, director of the Jerusalem-based Israel Policy Center, said. "We have complained to the state comptroller, the police commander and the interior minister."

The video was released more than six months after at least 1,700 police officers injured 300 Jewish protesters at Amona, trampling them with horses and beating them with batons. The Knesset has established a committee to investigate charges of widespread police brutality.

For more than six months, the police, claiming the material was sensitive, refused to release a video of Yitzhak briefing his commanders before the assault on Amona. Finally on October 2006, Yitzhak gave Klein the video as part of his insistence that he did not order an attack on the 2,000 demonstrators, most of them who resisted passively to the house demolition.

Experts employed by the center examined the police footage and determined that video was altered, Klein said. He said the video comprised footage taken by two cameras and that the date that appeared was March 5, 2006, five weeks after the Amona operation.

"It appeared that the material was extracted from a larger body of material," Klein told a news conference on May 8. "We requested the raw footage, but the police said that this is all the footage they have."

The police video also showed the exact same shot of police being briefed by Yitzhak six times. Klein also said six minutes of footage was missing from the video.

During the briefing, in which Yitzhak is seen addressing more than 1,000 officers, the commander warned that the international media would record the Amona operation. He said a small portion of Jews was expected to clash with police.

"Anyone who is inside the circle or in the buildings, we will take him out," Yitzhak was seen in the video as telling the officers. "And if he resists passively, then that is the end of the matter. You have helmets and clubs. If you need to, then use them, but if you don't need to, then don't use them."

Police have not responded to the allegation. Efforts to reach the spokesman of the police's Judean and Samarian Region were unsuccessful.

Klein has demanded that State Comptroller Micha Lindenstraus investigate Yitzhak. Klein raised the possibility that police were concealing what Yitzhak really told troops before the assault on Jewish demonstrators.

"We suspect that this briefing is not the real briefing," Klein said. "Who was this video made for and why? If this is not the real briefing, what happened to the real briefing?"