Amos Ben Gurion, Tel Aviv’s deputy police chief and son of Premier David Ben Gurion, won a libel suit today against four individuals and a volunteer organization fighting graft for falsely accusing him of corruption in office. The court awarded Mr. Bent Gurion 5,000 pounds and costs.
The court found the defendants, publishers of a pamphlet entitled “Danger Threats From Within” and Hashurat Hamitnadvim guilty of three of six counts of libel charged by Mr. Ben Gurion. They were: that Mr. Pen Gurion had used his influence to quash a case against a friend, that he had informed the friend of the investigation against him, and that he had associated with the man knowing that criminal proceedings had been instituted against him.
The judge’s 60-page decision, which also took Mr. Ben Gurion to task for being involved in private business while acting as a civil servant and for attempting to influence public opinion in his behalf during the trial, ended a three-month trial. More than 500 exhibits were mustered by attorneys for both sides, who included some of Israel’s top legal minds.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
