No help from US for ‘full probe’ into Shireen killing
WASHINGTON: A relative of slain Palestinian american journalist Shire en Abu Akleh said that the Biden administration’s top diplomat refused her face-to-face appeal to push for a full US investigation into the killing of the veteran television correspondent.
Niece Lina Abu Akleh also said Secretary of State Antony Blinken and US officials declined in meetings with her this week to provide any more information than they had already made public about how Americans reached the findings about the killing that they released this month.
A July 4 statement issued by the State Department concluded that Israeli forces likely fired the shot that killed Shireen Abu Akleh in May, but that there was no indication Israelis intentionally shot the veteran Al Jazeera correspondent. The 51-year-old reporter, an American citizen, was highly respected in the Arab world for her decades covering Palestinians and other Arab communities.
“I felt like we left the meeting with more questions. And our questions were still not answered,” her 27-year-old niece told reporters in an interview on Wednesday at the Capitol, where she pressed lawmakers for help obtaining more answers.
State Department spokesman Ned Price did not immediately address questions from about the niece’s account of her discussion on Tuesday with Blinken.
Price referred instead on Wednesday to his earlier remarks to reporters that Blinken was meeting with Shireen Abu Akleh’s family to express a “message of condolence ... and a message of the priority we attach to accountability going forward,” as well as to hear from her survivors.
Abu Akleh was shot and killed while covering an Israeli military raid on May 11 in the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank.
Palestinian eyewitnesses, including her crew, say Israeli troops killed her and that there were no fighters in the immediate vicinity or any exchange of fire at the time she was shot.
Israel denies its forces deliberately targeted her, but says an Israeli soldier may have hit her by mistake during an exchange of fire with a fighter.
US lawmakers and Abu Akleh’s family pressed the Biden administration to push for more of a accounting in the killing of a US citizen.
US security officials subsequently examined the results of separate Palestinian and Israeli investigations. That led to Price, the State Department spokesman, releasing the early July statement that Americans “found no reason to believe that this was intentional but rather the result of tragic circumstances during an Idf-led military operation against factions of Palestinian Islamic Jihad.” The acronym refers to Israeli defence forces.