The Justice Ministry’s Police Investigation Department (PID) submitted an appeal to the district court on Tuesday of the decision to acquit a police officer who shot 18-year-old Solomon Tekah and was tried for negligent homicide. Tekah, an Ethiopian youth, was shot to death in 2019.
The appeal was based on two things. The first is that self-defense does not apply because the officer’s life was not in immediate and real danger, the PID said.
What was the appeal based on?
Secondly, although the officer was in some amount of danger from the rocks thrown at him, he fired a warning shot at the ground instead of in the air, which is against police orders, and so was negligence, it said.
The appeal also claimed that the acquittal, handed down in April, set a new and dangerous precedent that allows for too much judgment to be used when deciding how to fire a warning shot in the case of danger to an officer’s life.
This is at odds with the purpose of the orders surrounding how warning shots are to be fired, which are meant to create certainty and uniformity in how they are used and to minimize the danger involved, said the PID.
Beyond the legal error that the department believes occurred, it believes that “the acquittal sets a new norm that contradicts the existing law, which could send a confusing and incorrect message to Israel Police, security workers, and gun owners that has the potential to endanger lives,” it said.
The incident of the shooting in 2019
The officer who shot Tekah in 2019 said that after arriving at a playground with his family, he broke up a brawl between teenagers, after which the group, Tekah included, threw stones at him and his family.
Feeling their lives were in danger, the police officer said he shot at the ground.
Despite many versions of the incident, the evidence showed that the bullet ricocheted off the asphalt and hit Tekah.
The killing triggered widespread protests in 2019, with some claiming that excessive police force was directed at the Ethiopian-Israeli community and that this contributed to Tekah’s shooting.
Yael Halfon, Maariv, Yonah Jeremy Bob, and Mark Weiss contributed to this article.