France has appealed to Israel to free the would-be murderer of Shas party spiritual leader and former Chief Sephardic Rabbi Ovadia Yosef.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner requested clemency for Salah Hamouri, a Palestinian Authority Arab resident of Jerusalem with French citizenship.
The request was conveyed in two letters -- one from Sarkozy himself through the Israeli embassy in Paris, and received by the Prime Minister's Office on July 30, and the other letter, from Kouchner, delivered to Defense Minister Ehud Barak a few days earlier.
A legal advisor in Israel's Foreign Ministry is looking into the case, according to a spokesman for the Prime Minister's Office, who said that Israel will respond to the French request shortly.
The French leaders asked Israel to reduce Hamouri's sentence by a third for good behavior after being lobbied by pro-PA groups in France. The groups have attempted to draw a parallel between the 24-year-old would-be murderer's prison sentence and the captivity of IDF soldier Gilad Shalit.
The terrorist's mother, Denise, has argued that France must lobby for her son the same way it has for Shalit, since both are French citizens.
Hamouri, who confessed to planning the attack on Rabbi Yosef, is a member of the People's Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). He was arrested in 2005 on charges of conspiracy to murder the rabbi, whose address he knew because one of his co-conspirators had worked in Jerusalem as a delivery person for a local food vendor.
Shalit was kidnapped during a cross-border attack on an IDF outpost by Hamas terrorists from Gaza three years ago. His condition and whereabouts remain unknown, and his captors have allowed no one to see him or make contact in any way, including representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).