Torture and ill-treatment past and present

Off By Sharon Black

The decision to compensate the victims of torture and illegal detention during the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya (Britain has said sorry to the Mau Mau, 7 June) is heartening and must lend weight to claims for compensation by those whose civil and human rights were abused by British security forces in the first colonial counterinsurgency campaign of the postwar era, in Palestine.

Will the government now apologise for the torture and murder of a 16-year-old boy, Alexander Rubowitz, who was seized by an undercover police squad led by Major Roy Farran in the Rehavia district of Jerusalem on 6 May 1947? Rubowitz was a member of LEHI, the Fighters for the Freedom of Israel, a proscribed underground organisation responsible for numerous assassinations and bombings. But when he was apprehended he was doing nothing worse than distributing anti-British propaganda. He was taken to a deserted area outside Jerusalem, where Farran struck him repeatedly on the head with a rock, causing his death. Farran admitted this to his commanding officer, Colonel Bernard Fergusson, and said the policemen with him had stripped the boy’s body and mutilated it. The corpse was never recovered. Farran was subsequently investigated by …read more