Hamas gunmen in Gaza City (archive photo) Photo: AP
Israel frees prominent Hamas figure from prison
Former Hamas finance minister Omar Abdel Razek arrested by Israel after Gilad Shalit's abduction is released. 'Judge believed he period served was enough,' says Hamas minister al-Shaer
Israel
freed a former Hamas
minister from prison on Sunday, an official from the Islamist group said. The official said that Omar Abdel Razek, who was finance minister when Israel seized him in June 2006, had been freed by an Israeli judge.
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“The judge believed it was enough, the period that he served in prison," Nasser al-Shaer, a former Hamas minister, told Reuters of Razek's release.
"They have released him and he is on his way home". Israeli officials could not immediately confirm the release. Some 40 Hamas officials, including former lawmakers, remain in Israel custody.
Razek was one of half a dozen Hamas lawmakers and ministers arrested around the same time on suspicion belonging to a terrorist organization rejecting Israel's existence.
Those arrests came after gunmen captured IDF soldier Gilad Shalit
in a cross-border raid from Gaza in June 2006.
The Israeli cabinet voted earlier on Sunday to free five Palestinians in jail for minor offences as part of a swap deal
with Hizbullah
guerrillas in Lebanon for the bodies of IDF soldiers Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev who
were killed in a July 2006 raid.
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