Health Minister Danny Naveh has announced the firing of Prof. Yehuda Hiss from his position as Director of the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute. Hiss will remain Chief Pathologist at the Institute, however.
Hiss has been involved in many controversies over the past several years, including unauthorized use of body parts for research and other purposes. This past December, then-Attorney-General Rubenstein aroused objections from several directions in deciding that Hiss should not be charged with criminal behavior. Rubenstein said at the time that Hiss had broken no laws in providing "expert testimony" about autopsies at which he had not been present, nor in having used tissues and organs after autopsies without permission from the families of the deceased.
Minister Naveh said yesterday that Assaf HaRofeh Hospital Director Dr. Benny Davidson will take over the managerial responsibility for Abu Kabir. Parents of children whose corpses were mutilated in Abu Kabir expressed deep satisfaction with the decision, though some said that Hiss should be forced down from his position as Chief Pathologist as well.
In July 2002, while Hiss was under police investigation for suspicions including the removal of organs from 81 deceased persons without familial consent, the Supreme Court rejected a petition demanding his suspension. The petition had been submitted by the Movement for Quality in Government.
State Pathologist Hiss generally decides Israel's pathological-legal questions, and many people have been sent to prison based on his findings. His professional standards have often been publicly maligned. In August 1999, Jerusalem District Court Judge Ruth Orr sharply criticized him for testifying that a 12-year-old Arab rock-thrower died as a result of a beating by Beitar security chief Nachum Korman three years earlier. She wrote that Hiss "was carried away by his desire to find the exact cause of the death... and ignored important pathological findings that did not correspond with this desire."
In Oct. 1997, Margalit Omeisi filed a police complaint against Hiss, charging him with "violating the medical secrecy to which he obligated himself." Prof. Hiss had released, without authorization, the results of a DNA test he carried out, purporting to show that Omeisi was not related to a woman from California whom Omeisi said was her missing "Yemenite child" daughter. Both Omeisi and her apparent daughter said they did not accept the results of the Hiss test, and that the method he used was not authoritative.
Hiss has also been the subject of controversy regarding the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin. The police were asked to investigate charges that Hiss altered Rabin's wounds and submitted false evidence to the Shamgar Commission that investigated the killing. In March 1999, a group of Israelis presented findings by Barry Chamish showing that Hiss' pathology report contradicted other authoritative findings. Prof. Hiss had stated that Rabin suffered no damage to his spinal cord, nor was he wounded by a frontal gunshot wound to the chest. But Dr. Mordechai Gutman's surgical report, as well as taped testimony by Ichilov Hospital Director Dr. Gabi Barabash and former Health Minister Ephraim Sneh, indicate that Rabin's backbone was shattered and that there was a frontal chest wound.
Hiss has been involved in many controversies over the past several years, including unauthorized use of body parts for research and other purposes. This past December, then-Attorney-General Rubenstein aroused objections from several directions in deciding that Hiss should not be charged with criminal behavior. Rubenstein said at the time that Hiss had broken no laws in providing "expert testimony" about autopsies at which he had not been present, nor in having used tissues and organs after autopsies without permission from the families of the deceased.
Minister Naveh said yesterday that Assaf HaRofeh Hospital Director Dr. Benny Davidson will take over the managerial responsibility for Abu Kabir. Parents of children whose corpses were mutilated in Abu Kabir expressed deep satisfaction with the decision, though some said that Hiss should be forced down from his position as Chief Pathologist as well.
In July 2002, while Hiss was under police investigation for suspicions including the removal of organs from 81 deceased persons without familial consent, the Supreme Court rejected a petition demanding his suspension. The petition had been submitted by the Movement for Quality in Government.
State Pathologist Hiss generally decides Israel's pathological-legal questions, and many people have been sent to prison based on his findings. His professional standards have often been publicly maligned. In August 1999, Jerusalem District Court Judge Ruth Orr sharply criticized him for testifying that a 12-year-old Arab rock-thrower died as a result of a beating by Beitar security chief Nachum Korman three years earlier. She wrote that Hiss "was carried away by his desire to find the exact cause of the death... and ignored important pathological findings that did not correspond with this desire."
In Oct. 1997, Margalit Omeisi filed a police complaint against Hiss, charging him with "violating the medical secrecy to which he obligated himself." Prof. Hiss had released, without authorization, the results of a DNA test he carried out, purporting to show that Omeisi was not related to a woman from California whom Omeisi said was her missing "Yemenite child" daughter. Both Omeisi and her apparent daughter said they did not accept the results of the Hiss test, and that the method he used was not authoritative.
Hiss has also been the subject of controversy regarding the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin. The police were asked to investigate charges that Hiss altered Rabin's wounds and submitted false evidence to the Shamgar Commission that investigated the killing. In March 1999, a group of Israelis presented findings by Barry Chamish showing that Hiss' pathology report contradicted other authoritative findings. Prof. Hiss had stated that Rabin suffered no damage to his spinal cord, nor was he wounded by a frontal gunshot wound to the chest. But Dr. Mordechai Gutman's surgical report, as well as taped testimony by Ichilov Hospital Director Dr. Gabi Barabash and former Health Minister Ephraim Sneh, indicate that Rabin's backbone was shattered and that there was a frontal chest wound.