Self-incriminating testimony previously given by Lt. Gabriel Dehan, one of the 11 border policemen on trial for killing 47 Arab villagers at Kafr Kassem on October 29, was admitted into the court record here today. The military court trying Dehan, another army officer, and nine enlisted patrolmen, ruled that Dehan’s testimony was valid in spite of the fact that he had not been warned, when he made his original statement, that it could be used against him.
Dehan had stated, in pre-trial questioning, that he had shot at the Arabs under orders of the second officer on trial, Major S. Malinski. The latter had ordered him, Dehan said to show “no sentiment” toward the villagers returning home from the fields without warning that a curfew had been imposed on October 29, the day Israel had started its Sinai action. Malinski had reportedly said: “It is better that several should be dead, if that will insure quiet.” The prosecution contends that the major’s order was illegal and that, therefore, Dehan should have disobeyed it.
The Court later heard a statement by a third of the defendants, Lance Corporal Shalom Offer, who had been in charge of the men who fired on the Arabs. He testified that he had ordered firing on three truckloads of villagers after they had tried to run away. “Lt. Dehan witnessed the shootings and did not intervene, ” Offer swore.
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