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Rabin remembered 12 years after his assassination

Yesterday, Israel was to commemorate 12 years since prime minister and Nobel laureate Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by an extremist Jewish gunman with a series of nationwide memorial services.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and President Shimon Peres will attend an official ceremony at Jerusalem's Mount Herzl Cemetery along with senior military officials and other dignitaries.

Olmert will then address the Knesset during a special anniversary meeting in honor of the former premier, widely revered as a national hero both for his storied military career and his peace efforts in the 1990s.

Dignitaries along with members of the Rabin family attended a candlelighting ceremony on Tuesday at the residence of Peres, who as foreign minister was also at the fateful Tel Aviv rally in 1995 when Rabin was killed by Yigal Amir.

"The assassin shot him in the back but the whole nation was wounded in its heart. History and the people will never forgive him," Peres said in an address to the ceremony.

Students and Israeli youth representatives afterwards lit hundreds of beacons at major junctions across the country.

Rabin's daughter Dalia said she regretted that her father's assassin had not been executed.

"I think that he should have been killed, not because it's about my father but because the killer shot democracy in the back," she said.
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