Jerusalem, May 25: Israeli police recommended on Monday that Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman be indicted for violating public trust, charging he had illegally received documentation about an investigation into his own conduct.
Lieberman’s ultranationalist party is the second largest in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, and a decision to indict him could shake up Israeli politics at a sensitive moment for newly renewed diplomacy with Palestinians.
“Police have recommended charging Lieberman for violation of trust” regarding the alleged transfer of information to him by a former ambassador to Belarus, Micky Rosenfeld, a police spokesman, said.
Charges have also been recommended against the ex-envoy suspected of giving Lieberman a classified police document about an investigation against him, Rosenfeld said, adding it was regarded as illegal for Lieberman to accept the information.
The alleged offence took place several years ago while Lieberman was a lawmaker in Israel’s parliament.
It would be up to Israel’s attorney-general, Yehuda Weinstein, to decide to whether to indict Lieberman, against whom a previous police recommendation for charges in a separate incident, still stands.
Weinstein’s predecessor as attorney-general stepped down earlier this year without rendering any decision in that case, in which police said in August he ought to be charged in an alleged money laundering case of some years past.
Police were ‘hasty’- Lieberman source
Lieberman has said in the past he was innocent and would quit if he were to be indicted, but declined any immediate comment on the latest police decision.
A source close to him said that, “past experience with the hasty recommendations of the police speaks for itself, and there is no reason to get excited.”
Last year police said Lieberman ought to be charged with bribery, money laundering and obstruction of justice after a separate investigation, also into conduct from a period preceding his current post.
But the attorney-general’s office changed hands shortly afterwards before any decision was reached.
The Moldovan-born Lieberman, head of the Yisrael Beitenu party whose policies many Arabs have denounced as racist, is the latest of a series of Israeli public figures to face a police probe in the last few years.
Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is on trial for corruption charges after an investigation that forced his resignation in 2008. Olmert has said he was innocent of any wrongdoing.
As foreign minister Lieberman has taken a tough stance on U.S.-mediated peace talks with the Palestinians, often expressing scepticism as to whether any deal can be made in the negotiations revived just this month after an 18-month deadlock.
–Agencies