AN ISRAELI military court yesterday cleared a soldier of killing a British film-maker in the Gaza Strip two years ago.

James Miller’s death was captured by his own camera, which picked up the sound of shots in the dark as he walked towards an Israeli armoured vehicle at night in May 2003 while making a programme about Palestinian children in Rafah. His film was called Death in Gaza.

A military judge yesterday acquitted an Israeli officer identified as Lieutenant H of misusing his firearm. Early Israeli versions of the shooting held that soldiers opened fire after being attacked by Palestinian gunmen who were smuggling arms from the Egyptian border nearby. But Mr Miller’s footage of the incident, on the Philadelphi Route, which runs along the Gaza-Egypt border, showed no evidence of a gun battle.

Witnesses said that Israeli troops shot him at close range, even though he was wearing a bulletproof jacket with journalist markings, a helmet bearing the letters “TV” in fluorescent tape and his group was waving a white flag. A bullet struck him in the neck.

A post-mortem examination found that he had been hit by a bullet from an M16 assault rifle fired by soldiers facing him. The Israeli Army expressed regret but said that Mr Miller had taken great risks by being in a virtual war zone. Judge Advocate-General Avichai Mandelblith, Israel’s chief military prosecutor, had decided last month not to press criminal charges against the officer. He argued that while Lieutenant H fired against army rules, “it is not legally possible to link this shooting to the gunshot (wound) sustained by Mr Miller”.

A military police inquiry had reprimanded the soldier for allegedly firing his weapon in breach of rules of engagement. The decision angered Mr Miller’s relatives, who said that they would seek compensation in Israeli civil courts.

Mr Miller, 34, was an experienced documentary maker who had investigated war crimes in Chechnya and filmed the award-winning Beneath the Veil, about women living in Afghanistan under the Taleban.

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