A military court in Nablus today found four Arab terrorists guilty of the murder in May 1980 of six seminary students living in the Jewish Kiryat Arba quarter of Hebron. Sentence is expected to be handed down next Wednesday.
When the army prosecutor asked for a life sentence for the Arabs, an uproar broke out in the court and Kiryat Arba leader Rabbi Moshe Levinger was ordered removed from the court for creating a disturbance when he led a chorus of shouts for the death penalty.
The prosecutor told the court, when asked why he had demanded only a life sentence, that his instructions had been to ask for the lesser sentence than the possible maximum death penalty. The court noted that it did not have to abide by the request of the prosecution.
Mohammed Shubaki, 36, leader of the group, all members of the Al Fatah terrorist gang, told the judge, before the verdict was pronounced, that the four Arabs could not be regarded as criminals because their act of killing the six students was politically motivated. The other three Arab defendants were Adnan Jaber, 33, Yasser Zeidat, 31, and Dassir Taba, 27.
In the ambush attack with submachineguns and grenades, 16 other Jews were wounded while the group was returning from Friday night prayers to their houses.
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