Internal Security Minister Gilad Erdan says the Bedouin man killed by police earlier this year is to blame for his own death because he disobeyed officers.
“The driver didn’t obey the officers and continued toward police, and his intentions were not clear,” he says at the Knesset.
For weeks, police maintained that the man, Yaqoub Abu Al-Qia’an, was shot by police while carrying out a deliberate car-ramming attack against police who came to evacuate his unofficial village of Umm al-Hiran. However, leaked findings from an internal investigation indicated that Abu Al-Qia’an was not a terrorist and that officers at the scene fired at him without sufficient justification, before his vehicle struck and killed police officer Erez Levi.
Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan arrives at the weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem, on March 5, 2017. (Marc Israel Sellem/Pool)
Erdan, who initially sided with police in maintaining that Abu Al-Qia’an was a terrorist, has since partially walked back the claim, but has not apologized.
He says an internal police investigation will review the incident.
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