Vanunu detained again

international | rights, freedoms and repression | news report Saturday November 19, 2005 04:13 by Justin Morahan - Peace People

Whistleblower arrested on bus at checkpoint and taken in "for questioning"

The long persecution of Mordechai Vanunu continues as the State of Israel continues to refuse to Let Vanunu Go
For releasing the secrets of Israel's illicit nuclear arsenal, the powers that be within Israel seem bent on breaking his indomitable spirit.

Mordechai Vanunu was detained yesterday in Jerusalem as he crossed a checkpoint from Palestine into Israel to the north of Jerusalem

Reuters reports that Israeli paramilitary border police carried out a spot check on a bus travelling through al-Ram checkpoint towards Jerusalem, and noticed Vanunu among the passengers

Police spokesman Mickey Rosenfeld is quoted as saying: "He has been taken to our International Crimes Unit for questioning,"

An Associated Press report from Jerusalem quotes another police spokesman, Shmuel Ben-Ruby, as saying that Mordechai Vanunu was arrested because Israelis have been forbidden from entering Palestinian-controlled areas since fighting broke out between the sides in 2000

However, as the same report points out, an Israeli court ruled last May that an earlier visit he had made to "the Palestinian areas" did not constitute a violation of his conditions of release, which forbid him from visiting foreign countries.

The Times on line rpeorts that when arrested at the al-Ram checkpoint as he returned from the West Bank, Vanunu told public television . “I wanted to protest against the apartheid wall that is shutting the Palestinians off in a ghetto,” referring to the barrier that Israel is constructing through sections of the West Bank.

Vanunu was released from Ashkelon prison last April after eighteen years but was served notice on his release of severe limitations to his freedom. Among other penalties, he was forbidden to speak to foreigners, give interviews, approach embassies or go near the borders of Israel, change address for even one night without informing the police or leave the State of Israel. He rejects all of the strictures on his freedom and in January faces charges of having broken many of them.

During his term of imprisonment, he spent eleven and a half years in solitary confinment. For the rest of his sentence he was allowed only to associate with Israeli prisoners with whom he was unpopular and was forbidden contact with Palestinian prisoners who empathised with him.

Although forbidden, he continues to speak out on matters of peace and justice and human rights, particularly on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with which he is most familiar. In an al-Jazeerah interview last September he said: "If the Jews have the right of return, based on what happened 2,000 years ago, then the Palestinians have the right of return after 50 years as well. With one state, there will be no more conflict over land and there will be no more enemies."

Israel has consistently rejected pleas from all over the world to let Vanunu go. Since his release in April 2004, he has spent 579 days in the virtual prison of the State of Israel itself. Like a captured bird he was cruelly put into a miniscule cage-within-a -cage, then allowed access to the cage itself, and after eighteen years "released" to the kitchen of his captors but no farther.

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L18788706.htm http://breakingnews.iol.ie/news/story.asp?j=163005516&p=y63xx6zzz