Mustafa Dirani Loses Israel Torture Suit
Naharnet
16
Jan
2015
Israel's Supreme Court has thrown out a suit by a former Lebanese prisoner seeking damages from the Jewish state for his alleged torture while in Israeli custody.
The court on Thursday ruled that the nearly 15-year-old attempt by Mustafa Dirani to claim $1.3 million in compensation was not actionable in Israeli courts.
This was because after his release in a January 2004 prisoner swap, he "returned to the ranks of a terrorist organization, the goal of which was to act against the state (of Israel) and even to bring about its destruction," it said.
A former security chief for the Amal movement who later founded his own group, Dirani was snatched by Israeli commandos from southern Lebanon in 1994.
Israel believed he had information on missing Israeli airman Ron Arad, a navigator whose plane was shot down over Lebanon in 1986 and was thought to have been captured by Amal, then handed over by Dirani to Hizbullah, which remains Israel's arch-foe in Lebanon.
Thursday's court ruling, which was obtained by Agence France Presse, said that after his release and return to Lebanon in 2004 Dirani announced the merger of his group "The Believing Resistance" with Hizbullah.
The ruling said that gave him the status of an enemy alien who had no recourse to Israeli courts, and threw out Dirani's claim that his Israeli interrogator, known as "Captain George", sodomized him with a police baton during questioning.
"It is amazing to me that Dirani (imagines he) can be allowed, while fighting the state (of Israel) and wishing for its destruction, to use its institutions for his own needs," Chief Justice Asher Grunis wrote.
