Slain Palestinian reporter was tortured, brother says

Send this clipping to somebody

Transcribed from the clipping

“JERUSALEM — Palestinian journalist Hassan Abdel Halim, found dead last week after disappearing while researching fraudulent land purchases on the West Bank, was kidnapped and tortured before he died, his brother said yesterday. Also yesterday, Israeli police retracted their statement made Monday that it appeared Halim had been killed while making a bomb.

Halim’s decapitated and decomposed body was discovered Friday by Arab shepherds at Beit Horon, near the West Bank town of Ramallah. Police Deputy Superintendent David Cohen, who is heading the investigation into Halim’s death, said police were not ruling out the possibility that he was abducted and murdered. ‘He was definitely killed by a bomb.

The rest we don’t know and all possibilities remain open,’ Cohen said. He said police who told reporters Halim was killed while making a bomb had been misunderstood. The journalist’s brother, Mohammed Abdel Halim, told a news conference there were signs of torture on the body when it was discovered — burns, missing teeth and missing fingernails.

He said Halim, 36, had been wearing different clothes when he disappeared two months ago than when his body was found. Cohen said the mutilations could have been caused by the explosion that pathologists say killed Halim.

Palestinian journalists said yesterday they suspected Arab middlemen working with Israeli contractors of having killed Halim because of his investigations of allegations that Arab land was being fraudulently purchased for Jewish settlements on the West Bank.

Halim had been reporting for the East Jerusalem newspaper Al-Fajr, which is openly supportive of Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasir Arafat. Police charged two Israelis this month with swindling potential Jewish buyers of land in the West Bank.

At the news conference yesterday, Ziad Abu Ziad of the Arab Journalists Association of the Occupied Territories said: ‘What we are asking the police is to study whether Hassan’s death was not stage-managed, whether the bomb was not planted on him and then detonated.’

The Palestinian reporters said that Halim was partially blind and that it was inconceivable that he had been handling explosives.”

Context added by this archive

A Palestinian journalist killed while investigating land sales, and the police account retracted within days. His brother, his colleagues and the police are all quoted, and they do not agree.

Cite this clipping

"Slain Palestinian reporter was tortured, brother says," Philadelphia Daily News, 10 June 1988, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1988-017. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1988-017

This clipping is read closely in the section below

Where the confirmation came from