Israel has arrested Meir Ettinger, who tops the Shin Bet internal security organisation’s list of most-wanted Jewish extremists, for alleged involvement in “criminal nationalist activity”.
Ettinger, the 24-year-old grandson of late Jewish extremist Rabbi Meir Kahane, is scheduled to appear before a court in the northern town of Nazareth to have his remand extended, police spokeswoman Luba Samri said on Tuesday.
Samri said that he was arrested on Monday.
Kahane was the founder of the ultra-right Kach party, which was outlawed by Israel as a terrorist organisation in the 1980s.
He was shot dead by Arab gunmen in a New York hotel in 1990.
The Y-net news site published a document in which Ettinger purportedly advocated attacking Palestinians and vandalising sensitive Muslim and Christian holy sites, in order to create a major “revolution” and bring down the state of Israel.
Ettinger has been arrested multiple times in the past and served restraining orders banning him from entering the West Bank.
He had been living in Safed, northern Israel.
New measures approved by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s security cabinet could mean that prosecutors have more success in keeping him behind bars.
Among others, the security cabinet authorised administrative detention orders for Jewish extremists.
Commonly used against Palestinian militants, meanwhile administrative detention allows the arrest of a person deemed a security risk, even before he commits a crime.
Attorney Yuval Zemer slammed the arrest as a “public relations” stunt, in the wake of an arson attack in a northern West Bank village that killed an 18-month-old and critically injured his parents and his 4-year-old brother.
(dpa/NAN)
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