Wednesday, February 20, 2013

20-Feb-13: Following up a 2011 Gaza murder

Some of our readers will remember the name Vittorio Arriogoni. We wrote about him here ["14-Apr-11: Gazan jihadists grab Italian journalist, threaten to murder him in name of glorious revolution"] nearly two years ago, on the day that he was snatched while on a visit to Gaza and hustled away by unknown parties. 

Arrigoni's anti-Israel writings were and still are all over the web. Perhaps for this reason, a Palestinian Arab newsagency (in Arabic but click to get the English translation) we quoted at the time blamed his kidnapping on (whom else?) the Israelis.

In the end, of course, the evil on Gaza's streets turned out not to have been done by Israelis but by (whom else?) Gazans. And a day after his kidnapping, Arriogini was found dead. He had been hanged


Now to the follow-up.


AFP reported yesterday that two Gazan "police officers" called Mahmud al-Salfiti and Tamer al-Husasna were convicted in 2012 for the kidnap and murder of the Italian "activist" who was a member of the notorious terrorism-friendly International Solidarity Movement. They had been sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labour, but yesterday (Tuesday) an entity by the name of the "High Military Court" announced it had accepted their appeal and reduced the convicted murderers' prison terms to a mere 15 years.


AFP appears not to have noted this but a cluster of human rights groups immediately issued a demand that the High Military Court 

publish the reasoning of its decision to reduce the sentence as soon as possible, in order to clarify its motive despite the seriousness of the crime.
Al Jazeera expresses the indignation well (see "Gaza court cuts sentence in Italian murder", published yesterday).
Arrigoni's death shocked Gaza and the community of international aid workers in the territory where he had lived and worked for around three years leading up to his death. It was the first time a foreign national had been murdered since Hamas took over the Gaza Strip in 2007. 
Imagine: Gaza enters into a state of pandemonium because its terrorists carry out a killing on their own home turf instead of in the infidel Zionist domain. We can only imagine what such unthinkable conduct must be doing to the high moral standards and the fundamental life-affirming decency of the Hamas-dominated enclave and its jihadist hordes.

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