Journal Tribune · Biddeford, Maine · 15 April 1998

CP-1998-001

Palestinian freed after 6 years in Israeli jail

Samar Assad, Associated Press, Ramallah, West Bank

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Transcribed from the clipping

“RAMALLAH, West Bank — Israel unexpectedly released a leader of a radical Palestine Liberation Organization faction today after holding him nearly six years without charges or trial. Ahmed Qatamesh, 46, was the longest-held prisoner in so-called administrative detention and was at the center of a campaign by human rights activists trying to end the practice.

Dozens of friends and relatives showered Qatamesh with yellow flower petals as he entered his home in the West Bank town of Ramallah. Clutching a bouquet of flowers, Qatamesh hugged his wife and 8-year-old daughter.

Qatamesh, a leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a radical PLO faction, said he was happy to be home, but also felt ‘extreme anger and frustration’ over the five years and eight months he spent in prison.

A second PFLP activist, Hassan [—]afafta, 35, was also released today after serving four years in administrative detention, said Qatamesh’s lawyer, Jawad Boulos. In all, about 200 Palestinians and Lebanese are currently held without charges, some imprisoned for several years. Israel says administrative detentions are an important tool in the fight against terrorism.

However, human rights groups say imprisonment without due process can never be justified. Qatamesh was never convicted of a crime, said his wife, Soha Barghouti. On Sept. 1, 1992, he was placed in administrative detention, and earlier this month, his term was extended for a 10th time for a period of six months.

David Bar-Illan, a senior adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said he did not know why Qatamesh won early release. The Israeli daily Haaretz said that while still in prison, Qatamesh granted interviews to two Israeli TV stations in which he spoke out against terrorism… Qatamesh was released early today from Damoun prison in northern Israel.

On the way home to Ramallah, he stopped at a West Bank cemetery where his mother and father are buried. Dozens of friends and relatives awaited his arrival in Ramallah. ‘We welcome the leader, teacher and comrade,’ read a banner outside his home signed by the PFLP… Mrs.

Barghouti said that in recent months, eight of the longest-held administrative detainees had been freed, and suggested that the Israeli government was beginning to respond to the human rights campaign being waged inside Israel and abroad.

Administrative detentions were first used by the British during their rule of pre-state Palestine, and one of those held by the British at the time, former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, said today the practice would be phased out.”

Context added by this archive

Five years and eight months without charge, and the detail the paper puts last: the practice was inherited from the British, and one of the men they had held that way was a later Israeli prime minister. The advertisement under it is for a hair salon in Biddeford. The first letter of the second man’s surname falls off the left edge of the clipping and is not supplied here.

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• Security reasons, and what they were given for

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