Slain Palestinian girl's family pushes trial for soldiers
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AFP – The parents of 10-year-old Palestinian girl Abir Aramin attend a memorial rally for her death in the …
17-8-2010
JERUSALEM (AFP) – The family of a 10-year-old Palestinian girl shot dead by Israeli troops in 2007 vowed on Tuesday to bring the soldiers to trial after an Israeli court blamed the military for her death.
A Jerusalem court on Monday said troops had wrongly killed Abir Aramin, who was shot in the head with a rubber bullet on the outskirts of Jerusalem in January 2007 after other Palestinian youths threw stones at nearby soldiers.
The court ruled the shot "was not aimed at the rock-throwers and was unjustified" and that the state should pay the family compensation.
"Now that the court has blamed the soldiers we are now demanding that they be tried," the family's lawyer Leah Zemel said.
"It's easy to despair of the Israeli courts, because a large number of these cases end in failure, but in our case justice was served and in order to complete this justice we want to see the soldiers stand trial," she said.
Israeli police closed the case immediately after the incident, when soldiers said Aramin had been struck in the head with a stone, but the family convinced the Supreme Court to reopen it last October.
The girl's father, Bassam Aramin, co-founded Combatants for Peace, a group of former Palestinian militants and Israeli soldiers, in 2005 after serving seven years in prison for planning an attack on Israeli troops.
"I have been working day and night for three and a half years to prove that they killed Abeer, and the fatigue is almost worse than the pain and suffering of losing my daughter," he told AFP.
"But I never lost hope, because I do not want my son to take revenge some day for the killing of his sister," he said, adding that he would stick with the case until the soldiers are brought to trial.
"I am one of those who support peace. I have Israeli friends in the peace movement and even they did not believe that Abeer was shot by Israeli soldiers ... I wanted to prove to them that their soldiers killed my daughter."
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