Rabin's assassin threatens conjugal visits hunger strike
Yitzhak Rabin’s assassin has threatened to begin a hunger strike if he is not granted conjugal visits with the woman he says he married by proxy, a spokesman for the Israeli Prisons Authority said today.
Yigal Amir, serving a life term for killing then-prime minister Rabin at a peace rally in 1995, recently wrote a letter saying he would begin a hunger strike, but has yet to remove any of the food from his room or refuse to accept meals, said the spokesman, Ofer Lefler.
Lefler said Amir had food for at least four days in his room. “He still has not removed one piece of food from his cell,” Lefler said.
In March, the Israeli Supreme Court rejected Amir’s request to have conjugal visits with Larisa Trimbobler, a divorced mother of four.
Trimbobler and Amir insist a rabbi secretly married them over the phone last year, but rabbis and the Prison Authority refuse to recognise the marriage, saying it is invalid under Jewish law because Amir was not joined by two witnesses.
Amir, an ultranationalist Jew, said he killed Rabin to prevent the handover of land to the Palestinians under a peace deal. Defined a security prisoner, Amir has video cameras in his cell that monitor his movements.
The word “Nazi” was spray-painted on Rabin’s marble memorial in Tel Aviv today, the Yediot website reported.
Vandals have desecrated Rabin’s grave in Jerusalem and the memorial in Tel Aviv several times in recent weeks, in actions the police tie to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s plan to withdraw from the Gaza Strip, which infuriates ultranationalist Jews.
