Wife of jailed Rabin assassin Yigal Amir registers party calling for his freedom
As party registration kicks off, new faction seeks to clear right-wing extremist convicted of gunning down prime minister at 1995 peace rally
Raoul Wootliff is the The Times of Israel's political correspondent.

The wife of Yigal Amir, the man who assassinated prime minister Yitzhak Rabin at a peace rally 24 years ago, officially registered a new political party on Tuesday to run in March’s election, as the Central Elections Committee kicked off two days of party registration.
Filing forms for the Mishpat Tzedek (Fair Trial) party, Larissa Trimbobler-Amir called for a retrial for her convicted husband and “all other innocent people unjustly incarcerated.”
Yigal Amir’s mother, Geula Amir, is placed number six on the list of eight candidates presented by the new party.
Amir, now 49, is serving a life sentence for the assassination of Rabin. He remains in solitary confinement, though he got married while in prison in 2004 after a protracted legal struggle.
The case against Amir was clear-cut: He was caught on video raising a gun to Rabin. He calmly confessed to the police, reenacted the crime for them and never recanted his testimony.

Still, fringe conspiracy theories have emerged positing a number of possibilities other than Amir being the assassin. The theories rely on some purportedly ambiguous facts surrounding the night of the murder: claims that the bullets were blanks, witnesses who say they didn’t see blood at the scene, an abnormally long drive to a very nearby hospital.
Previous attempts to have Amir freed based on the conspiracy theories have fallen short.
Both the court that convicted Amir and the subsequent Shamgar Commission established to investigate the chain of events leading up to the assassination rejected the conspiracy claims and concluded that Amir was guilty of murder.
Trimbobler-Amir, who has long campaigned to free her husband, said on Tuesday that “only we can do it, not the politicians, they don’t care.”

With 48 days to go until the March 2 national vote, the Central Elections Committee opened its doors at 11 a.m, on Tuesday for parties jostling for the Knesset’s 120 seats to register their rosters.
With over 40 parties in total having taken registration forms, only nine had filed by Tuesday afternoon, setting up a potentially busy day on Wednesday before the midnight deadline.
One by one, parties presented their lists to the committee’s chair, Supreme Court Judge Neal Hendel, filing details on each candidate and requesting a letter or letters from the Hebrew alphabet that will represent them on ballot slips come April.
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