Detainee died under Israeli torture - Palestinians

RAMALLAH: A Palestinian prisoner who died in an Israeli jail was tortured to death, a Palestinian official charged on Sunday, dismissing Israeli accounts of an apparent heart attack.

Arafat Jaradat’s autopsy showed torture resulting from fractures in his body and skull while his heart was in good condition, said Issa Qaraqaa, the minister in charge of prisoner affairs, citing a Palestinian doctor who took part in the autopsy.

“These results prove Israel killed him,” Qaraqaa told a news conference.

Jaradat died on Saturday in an Israeli jail from what prison authorities initially said appeared to have been a heart attack.

The 30-year-old man from Sair near Hebron in the West Bank was arrested last Monday for alleged involvement in a November 2012 stone-throwing incident which injured an Israeli, according to Israel’s Shin Bet domestic intelligence service.

Palestinians said he was a member of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the armed wing of Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas’s Fatah movement.

Jaradat’s body was transferred to a hospital in Hebron late on Sunday after an autopsy at Israel’s national forensic institute near Tel Aviv in which the Palestinian doctor participated.

He was to be buried at noon on Monday.

An Israeli police spokesman had no comment on the autopsy results or investigation into Jaradat’s death, and would only say that “the subject is still under examination.”

AFP