“Captain George,” the fictitious name for a former state interrogator, submitted
a psychiatric evaluation to the Tel Aviv District Court to strengthen his claim
that he suffered emotional harm from the way he was forced to leave his position
in the security apparatus.
He claims partial disability and NIS 6 million
in damages from the way the state handled claims made against him for his
conduct of the interrogation of Mustafa Dirani.
The former interrogator
claims that the state abandoned him despite the fact that the lawsuit filed
against him was groundless.
Dirani, who was released as part of a
prisoner exchange in 2004 and is now in Lebanon, is suing the state for NIS 6m.
in damages, claiming that while in administrative detention in Israel,
interrogators had raped him, sodomized him with a club, kept him naked for weeks
and humiliated him in an effort to extract information about missing IAF
navigator Ron Arad’s whereabouts.
The interrogator, whose identity has
not been revealed and who is known only by his nickname, “Captain George,”
served as an officer in Unit 504 of the IDF’s Intelligence Division and was
appointed to the investigation against Dirani.
According to the lawsuit,
filed by attorneys Efi Nave and Hila Bodik-Kochman, the state deliberately
concealed one of the 47 tapes of Dirani’s interrogation. That tape allegedly
shows that the commander of Captain George’s unit, and not Captain George, was
the person responsible for interrogating and pressuring Dirani while the latter
was naked, the lawsuit claims.
Captain George’s lawyers further argue
that their client was harmed following Dirani’s allegations, which resulted in
his employment in Unit 504 being terminated.
Nave told Channel 2 on
Sunday that the state had “thrown [Captain George] to the dogs after years of
concealing tapes showing that the unit commander is the one who interrogated
Dirani and threatened him, and not [Captain George].”
Dirani is a former
leader of Lebanese Shi’ite terrorist group Amal, whose forces captured IAF
navigator Lt.- Col. Ron Arad in October 1986 during a mission to attack PLO
targets near Sidon in Lebanon. In 1994, Israeli special forces captured Dirani
in Lebanon, believing he had personal knowledge of Arad’s
whereabouts.
Dirani was released in 2004 as part of a prisoner exchange
with Hezbollah, despite a High Court petition by Arad’s family to try to prevent
his release. In return, Hezbollah returned the bodies of three IDF soldiers
killed by the terrorist group in October 2000, together with kidnapped Israeli
businessman Elhanan Tannenbaum.
Joanna Paraszczuk contributed to this
story.