Police questioned the parents of Yitzhak Rabin's confessed assassin Tuesday and released two of the gunman's friends on bail.
Geula and Shlomo Amir have said they had no idea their son, Yigal, plotted for months to kill the prime minister, and Geula Amir has publicly disowned her son.But police have found a cache of weapons and explosives hidden in the Amir home and yard in the coastal town of Herzliya. And another son has been arrested as a suspected accomplice in the Nov. 4 murder.
Police said the Amirs were taken to a police station in the Tel Aviv suburb of Petah Tikvah for questioning but gave no other details.
Yigal Amir, 25, has insisted he acted alone in shooting the prime minister after a Tel Aviv peace rally. The chief of the Shin Bet security services reportedly believes Amir was a lone assassin, but police contend Rabin was the victim of a Jewish extremist conspiracy and have taken nine people into custody.
One suspect, Avishai Raviv, was released after several days of questioning. Reports have said that he was a Shin Bet mole, a charge he denies.
The two suspects released Tuesday, Ohad Skornick and Michael Epstein, are friends of Amir's and were arrested shortly after the assassination.
Police suspected Skornick and Epstein knew of Amir's plans to shoot the prime minister. They were ordered to post $1,000 bail, placed under house arrest for a week, barred from talking to journalists and ordered to stay away from the West Bank for six months.
The releases reduced to six the number of suspects in detention, including Amir, his brother Hagai and a former girlfriend, Margalit Harshefi.
Skornick and Epstein were released from a police station in the Tel Aviv suburb of Petah Tivka today. Wearing skullcaps, jeans and white sneakers, they emerged from the police station's metal doors and walked silently past reporters.
Skornick's attorney said Tuesday that police no longer accused his client of conspiring to kill Rabin. "This suspicion no longer exists," Yaakov Weinrot said.
But police are still investigating whether Skornick belonged to an extremist group that planned to attack Palestinians to derail Israel-PLO peacemaking, Weinrot said.
Epstein's attorney said he believed his client was no longer a suspect. "I do not know of any suspicions against him," said the lawyer, Avi Har-Zahav.