22 March,2011 03:27 PM IST | | Agencies
Former Israeli president Moshe Katsav was on Tuesday sentenced to seven years in jail with an additional two years suspended for rape and sexual harassment by a court in Tel Aviv.
Katsav was convicted three months ago on two counts of rape involving one former employee and indecent assault involving other female subordinates while serving as a cabinet minister and later as president.
The charges brought against him included two counts of rape, sexual harassment, indecent assault, witness harassment and obstruction of justice.
He was also ordered on Tuesday to pay 100,000 shekels ($28,000) in compensation to one of his victims.
"The accused is a symbol. The fact that he performed these acts while holding a high rank only makes his acts more severe," court president George Kara said.
"The defendant committed the crime and like every other person, he must bear the consequences. No man is above the law," Kara said.
The court's decision was not unanimous, with one of the three judges pressing for a lesser jail term.
Katsav, who is expected to start serving his sentence in early May, burst into tears when the sentencing was handing down and cried out that the entire verdict was 'a mistake'.
"You have caused me grief. You have allowed the lies to triumph," he said. "The girls know that they lied."
The allegations against Katsav surfaced in July 2006 when a journalist reported that the former president had complained to the attorney general that he was being blackmailed by a former employee who claimed he had sexually abused her.
The affair snowballed into one of complaints against Katsav himself, stemming from his time as a government minister and as president. Charges were brought four years later, after accusations against him from 10 women.
Katsav insisted he was innocent and rejected a plea bargain which would have seen him convicted on lesser charges, and at worst led to a suspended sentence.
Katsav, at the time a front-bench legislator from the Likud Party, was the unexpected victor when parliament chose Israel's eighth president in July 2000, defeating elder-statesman Shimon Peres.
It was hoped at the time that he would restore to the presidency much of the dignity it appeared to have lost under his predecessor, the flamboyant, maverick and outspokenly undiplomatic Ezer Weizman, who had been forced to curtail his term because of a financial scandal.
Peres became president after Katsav resigned in 2007.
