The accused officer’s lawyer, Efrat Nahmani Bar, has stressed her client’s youth — he is 19 — and inexperience. She said she was confident that prosecutors would drop the case entirely after a hearing.
“That is the just thing to do,” she said.
According to prosecutors, Mr. al-Hallaq, who lived just downhill from the Old City in East Jerusalem, aroused the suspicions of police at about 6 a.m. on a Saturday when, wearing black disposable gloves and a surgical mask because of the pandemic, he crossed under the 500-year-old Lions Gate on his way to school.
Without being more specific, prosecutors said that “certain characteristics” of Mr. al-Hallaq’s behavior led two officers, watching him from a distance, to identify him as a potential “terrorist.”
When he did not heed their orders to stop, they gave chase, and other officers joined in. One of them, a 21-year-old commander who was to leave the force within days, shot twice at Mr. al-Hallaq’s feet while pursuing him but missed.
Mr. al-Hallaq then turned into a fenced-in area used by sanitation workers where, according to witnesses, he cowered in a corner. Among those looking on was one of the teachers from his school.
The teacher has said that she yelled to the officers that Mr. al-Hallaq was disabled and posed no threat.
When the 19-year-old officer, who had completed his basic training only a few weeks earlier, arrived and spotted Mr. al-Hallaq in the corner, he shot him once in the abdomen, prosecutors said, even as his commander shouted at him to hold his fire.
Source link
Share on Facebook
Tweet
Follow us
