Rabin killer's brother held for Israel president threat

An Israeli court Wednesday placed the brother of slain premier Yitzhak Rabin's killer under house arrest on suspicion of incitement against President Reuven Rivlin in a Facebook post, police said.

Hagai Amir, released from prison in 2012 after more than 16 years behind bars for conspiring with his brother Yigal Amir to assassinate Rabin in November 1995, was arrested Monday after posting that it was time for Rivlin "to pass from this world".

At a ceremony Sunday marking the 20th anniversary of the killing, Rivlin pledged that he would never agree to calls from Yigal Amir's supporters to release him from prison, where he is serving a life sentence.

Hagai Amir posted in response that "the time has come for Rivlin and the Zionist state to pass from this world due to the crimes they have committed against their people, and that day is not far."

The Amirs are among radical Orthodox Jews who do not recognise the secular state of Israel founded in 1948, saying that only God has the authority to create such an entity.

"God decided that Rabin would die," Hagai Amir wrote in the post.

In 2006, while in prison, he was given an additional 12 months for threatening the life of former premier Ariel Sharon after telling a guard: "I can make one phone call and make sure Sharon is killed and blown up."

Sharon ordered Israel's 2005 unilateral pullout from the Gaza Strip, enraging Israeli rightists.

Yigal Amir shot Rabin, 73, three times in the back in what he later said was an attempt to derail the peace process he was pursuing with the Palestinians.

Source: AFP