Thursday, June 03, 2010

Gaza aid flotilla: Henning Mankell calls for sanctions on Israel
Swedish crime novelist Henning Mankell, who travelled in the Gaza aid flotilla, has urged global sanctions on Israel after the deadly strike on the convoy.
 Published The Daily Telegraph:  02 Jun 2010


 In this image reviewed by the Israeli military and taken aboard an Israeli Naval vessel, Israeli Navy soldiers intercept one of several boats headed towards the Gaza Strip, in international waters in the Mediterranean Sea  Photo: AP

Mankell said sanctions against Israel would put pressure on the country to lift the naval blockade on Gaza just as sanctions against South Africa had contributed to the dismantling of the apartheid regime in that country.
"I think we should use the experience of South Africa, where we know that the sanctions had a great impact. It took time, but they had an impact," Mankell said in a TV clip on Swedish tabloid Expressen's Web site.

 The best-selling writer,(photo right - Henning Mankell. Photograph - Bertil Ericson - EPA.), who had been travelling in the aid convoy aboard the Swedish ship Sofia, also said that there were no weapons on the ships.
"I can promise there was not a single weapon aboard the ships," he told an Expressen reporter who was returning to Sweden with him after the writer had been deported by Israel.
When the reporter told him that nine people had died in the Israeli strike, he replied, "No, I had no idea - we had heard that nine maybe were injured."
Mankell, whose books about the gloomy inspector Kurt Wallander have sold more than 30 million copies worldwide, was one of 11 Swedes travelling in the aid convoy.

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