Rabin killer’s bid for freedom

A mysterious Jewish millionaire in America is bankrolling a high-profile campaign to secure the freedom of Yigal Amir, currently serving a life sentence without parole for assassinating the Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995.

Earlier this week, a pressure group representing hardline Israeli nationalists announced that the unidentified benefactor has funded a slickly-produced video calling for Amir to be pardoned, which will be distributed free to the public. Members of the singularly ill-named Committee for Democracy said the video was produced in response to the release earlier this week of some 200 Palestinian prisoners held on security grounds and last month's exchange of a convicted Lebanese terrorist for the remains of two Israeli soldiers.

A key figure in the Committee for Democracy is Amir's Russian-born wife Larisa Trembovler, a former academic with a doctorate in philosophy who divorced her first husband (with whom she had four children) after writing to Amir in jail to hail him as "a hero who sacrificed himself for his people".

Articulate and media-savvy, and fully signed up to the extreme views that led Amir to target Rabin for 'collaborating' in the Oslo peace accords with the Palestinians, she has repeatedly fought his corner against the Israeli authorities. Her determination to bear his child culminated in a bizarre incident after a prison visit when she was found to be in possession of a plastic bag containing her husband's sperm.

The couple were eventually permitted a conjugal visit, which resulted in her giving birth to a son last October: after Trembovler went to court, permission was granted for Amir to attend the ritual circumcision ceremony inside the jail (he attended in handcuffs and prison uniform). The saturation media coverage that this event received led the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, to pledge publicly that Amir would remain behind bars for the rest of his life.

Unsurprisingly, the ongoing campaign to free Amir - who has never expressed regret for killing one of Israel’s most respected leaders of recent years - is bitterly opposed by Rabin's family and has outraged many Israelis, for whom the assassination remains a profoundly traumatic event. A previous video released by the Committee, which claims that 150,000 free copies were distributed, controversially doctored a photograph of Israel's president, Shimon Peres, to show him draped in a chequered Arab kaffiyeh (headscarf). Some of Larisa Trembovler's associates make no secret of their extremist views and have convictions for violence against innocent Palestinians.

On the other hand, there was widespread revulsion among Israelis at the joyous celebrations which greeted the return home to the Lebanon of the freed terrorist, a multiple murderer whose victims included a young child. ·