Request For Prosecution
In June 2007, Lord Goldsmith, the then outgoing Attorney General for England and Wales, sent a request to his Israeli counterpart for legal proceedings to be enacted within six weeks to prosecute the soldier responsible for the killing. The request included new analysis of audio evidence which confirmed that the shot that killed Miller was fired from an Israeli armored personnel carrier.
Miller's sister, Anne Waddington, was interviewed by the BBC on the morning of 7 August 2007, the day the six-week deadline was due to expire. She said, "Unfortunately, we have had four and a half extremely painful years of experiencing the Israeli tactics, and they are the masters of delay - they have always played for time, and they have always failed to deliver." She added, "The Israelis put out a lot of false and misleading statements immediately after my brother was murdered, and they did try to suggest he was killed by a Palestinian in the back and as a result of crossfire, but they put out many, many lies and false stories, which of course have been shown not only on the APTN video footage of the actual murder, but also through eyewitness testimony and the additional evidence which was very, very clear at the time." Asked whether she used the word "murder" very deliberately, she replied, "Yes I do, and of course the jury in the inquest last year found, very unusually, that it wasn't just unlawful killing, it was actually murder."
On 7 August 2007, the Israeli Attorney General, Menachem Mazuz, requested more information on the new analysis. After being informed of his response, Miller's family issued a statement:
We are very pleased that General Mazuz has replied within the time limit set out in Lord Goldsmith's letter. This information has for the most part been in the possession of the Israeli investigators for more than four years. We will look on with interest to see whether Israel will seek to undermine the expertise of the Metropolitan Police's acoustic examination, or perhaps this will be the first significant step towards Israel pursuing justice.
At the request of Miller's family, Lord Goldsmith agreed to ask the UK Crown Prosecution Service to advise "on whether there is enough evidence for a prosecution in the UK under the Geneva Conventions Act in which case the UK government could request extradition." Eventually, the Israeli government agreed to pay the Miller family ₤1.75 million, if the British government agreed to close the case, and not demand the extradition of the Israeli soldiers involved in his killing.
Read more about this topic: James Miller (filmmaker)
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