Bullet that killed Shireen Abu becomes a central point of contention

JERUSALEM: MAY. 13 – The bullet that killed the journalist Shireen Abu Akleh on Wednesday has become the central point of contention between competing efforts by Israelis and Palestinians to investigate who shot her.

The Palestinian Authority said on Thursday that it had declined a request to give Israeli officials the bullet that killed Ms. Abu Akleh, a Palestinian American journalist for Al Jazeera who was killed in the occupied West Bank during an Israeli raid.

Hussein al-Sheikh, the Palestinian official who helps oversee the authority’s relationship with the Israeli government, said it would investigate Ms. Abu Akleh’s death independently, rejecting Israeli calls for a joint inquiry and for the bullet to be assessed in an Israeli laboratory. Mr. al-Sheikh also accused Israeli soldiers of killing Ms. Abu Akleh, dismissing Israeli claims that the journalist may have been hit by Palestinian fire.

Palestinian officials say that Israel cannot be trusted to investigate the killing, while Israeli officials say that the Palestinians are refusing to provide the bullet in order to obscure its origin.

Mr. al-Sheikh’s comments came as Palestinians gathered in Ramallah, the authority’s administrative hub in the West Bank, for Ms. Abu Akleh’s funeral procession, which wended through the city toward the headquarters of the authority’s president, Mahmoud Abbas.

“This crime cannot pass without punishment,” Mr. Abbas said in an address in front of her coffin. He also awarded her the Star of Jerusalem, or Al-Quds Star, an honor typically bestowed on ministers, ambassadors and members of Parliament.

The bullet that killed Ms. Abu Akleh has become the focus of two competing narratives about the circumstances of her death. Its shape could reveal the gun that fired it, and its condition may contain signs about the direction and distance it was fired from.

Palestinian officials have conducted an autopsy of Ms. Abu Akleh’s body but had not released its findings by Thursday morning.

A veteran and widely admired journalist for Al Jazeera, the Qatari-owned news channel, Ms. Abu Akleh was fatally shot early Wednesday in Jenin, a city in the northern West Bank managed by the Palestinian Authority.

She had been covering clashes between Palestinian militants and the Israeli military, which has been conducting regular raids in Jenin since March after several recent attacks on Israelis by Palestinian residents of the area.

Al Jazeera executives and witnesses said that Israeli soldiers had fatally shot Ms. Abu Akleh in a part of Jenin where no clashes were taking place, and where there were no nearby Palestinian militants. She and several other journalists at the scene were wearing blue flak jackets and helmets marked with the word “Press.”

Israeli officials said that clashes had been taking place in the area where she was killed and that she might have been killed during crossfire, by either Palestinian or Israeli forces.

Benny Gantz, the Israeli defense minister, said in a news briefing on Wednesday night that the Israeli military’s initial investigations “cannot indicate what gunfire was directed at Shireen, and I cannot exclude any option under this operational chaos that was on the ground.”

Mr. Gantz added: “It can be Palestinians who shot her. Tragically, it may be on our side. We are investigating it.”

Video filmed by a bystander depicting the moments after Ms. Abu Akleh’s death showed the journalist slumped face down, but it did not show the moment of her death or who had shot at her.

The Israeli government circulated a second video on Wednesday morning that showed Palestinian gunmen in a different part of Jenin firing down an alley, and a voice saying in Arabic: “They’ve hit one — they’ve hit a soldier. He’s lying on the ground.”

Although the video was shot in a different part of Jenin, the Israeli government said it suggested that Palestinian militants elsewhere in the city had mistakenly killed Ms. Abu Akleh, thinking she was an Israeli soldier. No Israeli soldier was killed on Wednesday.

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-NY Times