Daily Alert Archives

Mohammad al-Dura: Theater of the Absurd?

[Pajamas Media] Stephanie L. Freid - When ARD documentary filmmaker Esther Schapira viewed the now iconic images of Mohammad al-Dura and his father Jamal back in 2000, she felt there was more of a story to tell. Her latest work - "The Child, the Death and the Truth: The Mystery of the Palestinian Boy Mohammed Al-Dura" - aired in Germany this month. This time Schapira and crew went back to ask follow-up questions about issues that had surfaced the first time around. "Why don't we see blood in the images?" Schapira asks. "That didn't make sense to me back then. There was a claim of three bullets to the child - 15 fired on him and his father altogether - but no blood." Schapira procured images from Mohammed al-Dura's Gazan autopsy and hired German biometric facial imaging expert Kurt Kindermann to compare the autopsy, the funeral, and the France 2 images. Kindermann concluded that the boy at the funeral and in the morgue were most likely one and the same. They were not, however, the same boy seen crouching beside his father in the famous video sequence. Schapira presents these findings in her latest documentary along with an impossible timeline sequence: Mohammed al-Dura was shot at 2 p.m., but the Gaza morgue says he was brought in at 10 a.m. "I think it's strong evidence that there is no proof that Mohammed al-Dura is dead," Schapira concluded.
2009-04-08 06:00:00
Full Article