Arab leaders: We'll go on hunting October criminals

Arab leaders demanded on Saturday that the government reopen the investigation into the deaths of 13 people at the hands of police during the October 2000 riots, this time with the involvement of objective, international elements.

At a rally in Sakhnin marking the eighth anniversary of the incidents, Arab Monitoring Committee head Shawki Khatib said Arabs had "no faith" in the justice system. Next week, he said, Arab leaders would present the Prime Minister's Office and the President with a petition signed by some 250,000 people, calling for the establishment of a neutral, independent commission to probe the deaths.

Hundreds participated in Saturday's rally, whose speakers decried Attorney-General Menachem Mazuz's decision earlier this year to not indict police officers involved in the riots due to 'insufficient evidence.'

"We will continue to hunt the criminals" responsible for the Arab citizens' deaths, Khatib told the crowd.

In February tens of thousands of Arab Israelis demonstrated after Mazuz ruled that the killings were 'terrible and worrying' but there was not enough evidence to warrant indictments. He cited refusal of the families to allow autopsies of the dead as one of his reasons.

Thousands of Arab Israelis rioted for several days in October 2000 in solidarity with the Second Intifada against Israel, which was then erupting in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Protesters blocked off roads, threw rocks and firebombs, and in several cases, opened fire at police.

Police returned fire, and killed 13 rioters just outside the Arab Israeli town of Umm el-Fahm in the North.

Officers said they did not have enough non-lethal crowd dispersal gear and were heavily outnumbered by the violent mobs.

The Justice Ministry's PID stopped investigating the deaths shortly after the end of the riots, when the government appointed former Supreme Court justice Theodore Or to head a state commission of inquiry into the events and what led up to them. During the investigation, the commission identified policemen as suspects in several of the killings. In its final report, published on September 1, 2003, it called on the PID to resume its investigation of all the killings.

Two years later, in September 2005, the PID announced that it was closing all the files without a single indictment, either because it could not find sufficient evidence to press charges in some of the cases or because it could not find suspects in others.

The decision created such an uproar that Mazuz decided to reexamine the PID's findings. The following year, on October 15, 2006, Adalah - The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, which had represented the families of the victims during the Or Commission hearings, published a report called 'The Accused,' in which it carried out its own investigation of the killings and reached its own conclusions.

Saturday's speakers included Sakhnin Mayor Muhammad Bashir, and several Arab MKs.

Dan Izenberg contributed to this report.