A French attorney, Michel Blum, said today that a week-long investigation he conducted in Israel has not furnished him with proof that the defendants in the recent trial of Arab and Jewish members of a Syrian-directed spy ring had been tortured.
Blum, who carried out his investigation on behalf of the Catholic organization “Pax Romana” and the International Federation for the Rights of Man, said “I have not found a single proof that torture has been used on any of the defendants.” He said that only the lawyer of one of the defendants Soki Katim, an Arab, had charged that his client had been subjected to electric shocks, beatings, and “the bathtub treatment” but that a doctor had found no traces of these tortures. The lawyer of Daoud Turki, the Arab ringleader of the gang, said his client was subjected to moral pressures but no physical tortures. Dan Vered, a Jewish defendant, was injured during a fist-fight with a prison guard.
Another French lawyer, Christian Revon, told a press conference on April 5th that “Both the Jewish and Arab defendants had been tortured” and called upon the Israeli Government to permit an international commission to investigate the charges.
ISRAELI ACCUSES COUNTRYMEN OF TORTURE
(An Israeli who identified himself as chairman of the Israel League for Human and Civil Rights, accused Israel before a United Nations body Monday of mistreatment and torture of Arabs in the administered territories. The witness, Dr. Israel Shak, appeared before the General Assembly’s special committee to investigate Israeli practices affecting the human rights of the population of the occupied territories.
He alleged that Israelis tortured Druze on the Golan Heights who were accused of spying, for Syria and that they forcibly separated mixed Arab-Jewish families. He claimed that the establishment of settlements in the territories was a violation of human rights.
The special committee, consisting of Yugoslavia, Sri Lanka (Ceylon) and Somalia, none of which have diplomatic relations with Israel, conducted hearings during 1971 in several Middle Eastern countries on alleged Israeli practices in violation of the Geneva Convention on the treatment of civilians in occupied territories. The committee was denied admittance to Israel-held territories on grounds that it had refused to conduct hearings into the treatment of Jews in Arab lands.)
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