Brother of Rabin’s assassin suing informant for Shin Bet

JERUSALEM, Nov. 16 (JTA) – The convicted brother of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassin has filed a $1.4 million lawsuit against Avishai Raviv, saying the former Shin Bet informant entrapped him into helping with the assassination. Hagai Amir filed the lawsuit Sunday in the Tel Aviv District Court against Raviv, who was named last week in a declassified government report on the assassination as an operative of the Shin Bet domestic intelligence service. Perhaps the most disturbing of the report’s revelations was that Raviv failed to tell the Shin Bet about assassin Yigal Amir’s repeated boasts that he was planning to kill Rabin. The report also described how Raviv repeatedly attacked Arabs, initiated attacks against Jewish settlement leaders he considered too moderate and repeatedly told friends, including Yigal Amir, that the assassination could be justified on religious grounds. Amir, who has stated that he wanted to prevent Rabin from ceding land to the Palestinians, is serving a life sentence for the Nov. 4, 1995, assassination of Rabin at a Tel Aviv peace rally. His brother Hagai was convicted in October 1996 of conspiring to kill Rabin and was sentenced to 12 years in prison. In the lawsuit against Raviv, Hagai Amir’s lawyer claimed that Raviv had committed perjury on the witness stand when he denied working for the Shin Bet. The lawyer said that if Amir had been able to call witnesses to prove that Raviv worked for the Shin Bet and had incited violence against Rabin, Amir could have used an entrapment defense and received a lighter sentence.