Police arrest 36-year-old Jerusalem resident over suspected threat to kill AG

Police have arrested a 36-year-old man suspected of making threats on the life of Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, after he allegedly asked former chief rabbi Yitzhak Yosef for halachic approval to kill her.

According to Hebrew media reports, Yosef told Religious Affairs Ministry director-general Yehuda Avidan that a man had approached him with a request to issue a din rodef against Baharav-Miara — a religious decree applied to grave offenders giving people an okay to stop them, even if this requires killing them.

Avidan contacted the Jerusalem District police regarding the incident.

Earlier today, police launched an investigation after being made aware of a letter “containing an explicit threat to harm a public figure.”

Within hours, investigators located the suspect at his home in southern Jerusalem and arrested him on the spot, police say.

Officers plan to bring him tomorrow to court to request an extension on his remand, allowing them to continue their investigation into the letter.

Someone branded as a “rodef” is thought to be plotting to or in the process of murdering someone, which in traditional Jewish law gives bystanders the go-ahead to kill them.

The label became infamous in Israeli political history after Yigal Amir, the assassin of then-prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, cited it as a religious justification for his actions.

Baharav-Miara has come under fire from the current government, which voted earlier this month to dismiss her from her post, though the High Court immediately froze the move.

The legal official has also infuriated ultra-Orthodox leaders by ordering an end to subsidized daycare funding for families of draft dodgers, requiring the military to send thousands of enlistment orders to yeshiva students and pushing for the arrests of those who don’t comply.