Israeli soldiers who shot Palestinian village chief last week were on a training mission and not searching for a suspected terrorist as the army claimed, an Israeli newspaper said Friday.
Military sources cited by Jerusalem's Kol Hair weekly magazine named the army patrol involved as part of the Duvdevan unit, and said it was on a reconnaissance mission in preparation to deal with violence they fear could erupt if the Palestinians unilaterally declare a state on September 13th as they have said they may.
Duvdevan is an elite undercover unit, whose members frequently disguise themselves as Arabs to enter villages unnoticed.
Mahmud Assad Abdallah, 73, was shot in the pre-dawn hours of August 16 after he had fired at the soldiers with a pistol from the roof of his hilltop home in the West Bank village of Surda.
Family members said Abdallah, who frequently slept on the roof of his house, had probably feared that the soldiers were burglars or vandals.
The Israeli army denied Kol Hair's report, repeating its initial assertion that the troops had been on an "initiated operational mission" when the shooting occurred.
"It was not an exercise," the army spokesman's office told AFP. "It was an operational mission whose purpose was to locate a specific person."
After the killing, The Israeli army issued a statement expressing sorrow over Abdallah's death.
Kol Hair quoted sources close to Duvdevan as saying the exercise in Surda was "a link in a chain of exercises" carried out over the past few months, during which members of the unit had entered populated areas in the run up to September 13th.
It drew a parallel with an incident in February 1997 in the West Bank village of Hizma, when another elderly man, Mohammed al-Halo, was shot by Duvdevan in similar circumstances, and which the army explained in a similar way.
Surda is in the so-called Area B, where the Palestinian Authority has responsibility for civil affairs, but the Israeli army oversees security.
After the killing of Abdallah, two of his sons -- one of whom, Hisham, is a journalist in AFP's Jerusalem office -- were interrogated at length by agents of the Shin Beth domestic intelligence service.
Hisham said afterwards he had been questioned about alleged links with the Lebanese Shiite Muslim movement, and been told that the patrol had come to arrest him.
But when they questioned him again Thursday, the Shin Beth agents told him they had not intended to be in the village.
However, they refused to say what the troops were doing in the vicinity – OCCUPIED JERUSALEM (AFP)
© 2000 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
