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| - Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday apologised to the family of an Israeli Arab killed by police in 2017 after being wrongly identified as a terrorist. "I want to apologise to the Al-Qiyan family whose father, an Israeli citizen, was killed on the pretext that he was a terrorist when he wasn't," he said. During a January 2017 demolition operation in a Bedouin village, policeman Erez Levi and the Israeli Arab, Yacoub Mussa Abu al-Qiyan, were killed in disputed circumstances. Levi died in a "car ramming" and the driver was shot dead as a "terrorist", police said, whereas villagers said Qiyan was gunned down at the wheel of his car while driving at normal speed. On Monday night, a journalist with Israel's Channel 12 television showed documents from an internal police inquiry that determined police had been mistaken. The police chief at the time, Roni Alcheikh, had opted not to disclose the findings of the probe. Netanyahu said he was assured in 2017 that the police officer had been the victim of a terrorist car ramming. "I was told he (Qiyan) was a terrorist, and yesterday we discover he wasn't but was designated as such by prosecutors and police trying to cover up," he said. "This man was designated a terrorist just to... avoid the police being judged as irresponsible," said Netanyahu, who himself is in the crosshairs of prosecutors and police in three corruption cases. mib/vl/hc/pvh
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