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NABLUS (Ma'an) -- An Israeli military court at Ofer detention center on Monday ordered the release of a Fatah lawmaker detained in 2007, relatives of the official said.

Jamal Tirawi, 47, was detained on May 29, 2007, in Nablus and sentenced to 30 years in an Israeli jail for being affiliated with the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade.

His trial was postponed more than 70 times and took over four years.

His brother Raed told Ma'an that Israel had decided to release him after an appeal by his lawyer three years ago.

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Israeli court releases Palestinian terrorist, citing earlier pardon

Jamal Haj Tirawi was arrested in Nablus in 2007 for orchestrating a 2002 suicide bombing, despite having been named in a deal to keep him out of prison
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By Chaim Levinson | May.07, 2013 |3:19 PM

In a blow to a prosecution team from the Israel Defense Forces, a military court of appeals released a Palestinian terrorist from prison on Monday after he served six years for planning a 2002 suicide bombing in Tel Aviv.

The court ruled that Jamal Haj Tirawi should never have been arrested in the first place because he had been pardoned as part of a deal in which a group of wanted Palestinian men were given clemency on the condition that they not return to terror.
The military judges censured the IDF's prosecution team, saying that their behavior compromised justice.

Tirawi, a Nablus resident, was arrested in May 2007 and charged with planning the 2002 terror attack at the "My Coffee Shop" in Tel Aviv, in which Rachel Charhi was killed. During his trial, Tirawi insisted he had been part of an agreement, hatched between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, that granted him freedom from arrest if he remained in Nablus and refrained from terror.

At his first trial, Palestinian Authority security heads Mohammad Dahlan and Tawfik Tirawi were called to the stand as witnesses for the defense, and they stated that Tirawi had, in fact, been included in the agreement. The judges in the lower court, however, ruled that the interest in prosecuting Tirawi on such serious charges outweighed the pledge and the agreement, and they sentenced him to 30 years in prison.

Tirawi appealed, and on Monday, a panel of judges headed by court president Col. Aharon Mishnayot, ruled that the prosecution in the initial trial “had acted very ambiguously with regard to the very existence of the agreement regarding the wanted men and with regard to its content.”

The prosecution, he added, would have been better off not claiming that the head of the Shin Bet security service had no standing in the area and was thus not held to the agreement. "This is a very strange claim," he said.

What the prosecution should have done, Mishnayot said, was check the defendant's claims to their best of their ability. "In fact," he said, "the prosecution compromised the fairness of the criminal proceedings."

Against the lower court's ruling, Mishnayot ruled that the state's obligation to Tarawi outweighed their own interest in the criminal proceeding. “The credibility of the government toward the people is a clear public interest, not only because of the government’s basic obligation to act fairly and in good faith, but because of the need to keep open the possibility of dealing in a similar way of reaching an agreement in similar crises that could take place in the future,” he said.

Mishnayot said it seemed on the face of things that there was solid evidence to convict Tirawi, but on the other hand he believes that real weight had to be given to his rights, to justice and to fairness.

Mishnayot dismissed the charges, but noted that the ruling was not an exoneration or a declaration of Tirawi’s innocence. He said the court was aware of the difficult ramifications of its ruling for the family of the bombing victim, but that the court believed there was no other alternative.

The Army Spokesman’s Office responded that the military prosecution would “study the military court’s ruling and if needed would draw lessons.”