Shas’s Nissim Ze’ev proposes house arrest for Katsav

Knesset Interior Affairs Committee holds classified discussion on conditions of former president and convicted rapist Moshe Katsav’s imprisonment.

Former president Moshe Katsav at Supreme Court 311 (R) (photo credit: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun)
Former president Moshe Katsav at Supreme Court 311 (R)
(photo credit: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun)
The Knesset Interior Affairs Committee on Tuesday held a classified discussion on the conditions of former president and convicted rapist Moshe Katsav’s imprisonment.
The meeting was initiated by MK Nissim Ze’ev (Shas), who requested that the former president be kept under house arrest until after his final appeal, which is scheduled for January 8.
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Sources in the committee said that few MKs attended the discussion, and that Ze’ev, committee chairman Amnon Cohen (Shas) and MK Otniel Schneller (Kadima) favored the option of house arrest, while MK Dov Henin (Hadash) opposed. Representatives of the Public Security Ministry in the meeting also voiced opposition to the Shas MK’s initiative.
No vote took place, and the protocols of the discussion will be sent to Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch.
Ze’ev repeated his assertion that Katsav’s Kiryat Malachi home is “a building that is suitable for house arrest. It is surrounded by walls, which the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) required when Katsav was still president.”
“All of the elements necessary to legally put him in house arrest are already in place,” Ze’ev told The Jerusalem Post.
According to the Prison Law, a public security minister may send a prisoner to a “temporary prison” in case of “contagious diseases or other reasons that he sees fit for this instruction.”