A 41-year-old Bedouin chief was sentenced yesterday to 10 years in prison by a military tribunal for possession of large quantities of ammunition. But the court suspended six years of the sentence it pronounced on Sheikh Ibrahim Mouhammed Auda, leader of one of the Bedouin tribes recently evacuated from the Pitach Raffah area.
Sheikh Ibrahim was accused of concealing 80,000 rounds of ammunition in a waterproof bunker on his lands. The prosecution also contended that Bedouins in the Raffah salient had accumulated large quantities of arms and ammunition left behind by the Egyptians in 1967 and sold them to terrorists.
The charges against Sheikh Ibrahim were filed some time ago but his trial was delayed pending the outcome of an appeal by the Sheikh and other Bedouin chiefs to the Israeli Supreme Court against the seizure of their land by the military, The appeal was denied. Meanwhile, a military court in Lod imposed three life sentences on 34-year-old Nasri Mouhammed Bashir accused of terrorist activities including killing an Israeli officer and wounding four Israeli soldiers. Bashir, who comes from the Arab village of Sachnin in Upper Galilee, trained in various countries including Albania, according to the prosecution. The prosecutor said that if Israel had not outlawed capital punishment, Bashir’s crimes would have demanded the death penalty.
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