YIGAL AMIR's favourite book is Frederick Forsyth's assassination thriller, The Day of the Jackal. But behind bars, Amir insists that while his gun killed Yitzhak Rabin, God pulled the trigger.
The law student claims he was trying to save Israelis from the secular peace process and from handing back Jewish settlements to the Palestinians. But Yigal Amir (25) was not a West Bank settler. He came from a devout and strict Orthodox family of Yemenite origin that gradually pulled itself out of poverty.
For many years, Shlomo and Geulah Amir and their eight children were squeezed into two rooms in Neveh Amal, a poor neighbourhood outside Tel Aviv.
Shlomo Amir is a soft spoken immigrant who has spent most of his life scraping a living as a religious scribe and a ritual slaughterer. But the dominant figure in the family was the boy's mother, Geulah, a nursery schoolteacher who was known as the local "amateur social worker, a shoulder to cry on". She once ran on a Labour ticket in an unsuccessful campaign for a town council seat.
Their second child, Yigal, was born on May 23rd, 1970. As a boy, he was often a loner, but excelled at religious schools. He rejected the exemption from conscription available to Orthodox students, and opted for the Golani combat unit with its tough reputation. He was highly regarded by his commanders for his "thoroughness" in searches for Palestinian activists in Gaza.
In 1993, he enrolled in the lawn faculty of Bar Ilan University, known for both religious Zionism and right wing political activism.
The end of a five month relationship with a fellow student, Navah Holtzman, pushed Amir into a new frenzy of right wing activism. At a weekend demonstration at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron - the scene of the massacre by Baruch Goldstein - he became involved in heated arguments, quoting the religious precedent known as din rodef (the pursuer) for killing Jewish leaders who surrendered Jewish lands or endangered Jewish lives.
He began to stalk Yitzhak Rabin outside his home, at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum, and at the opening of a new section of motorway near Amir's own home. But on each occasion Rabin cancelled his plans or had gone by the time Amir arrived.
On the fatal night that Amir did get close to Rabin, he was mistaken by police for a Shin Bet agent. He aimed for the centre of Rabin's back, and fired three times.
Geulah Amir, watching the news at a friend's house, wailed: "What has our son done?" She hurried home to her husband. "He's destroyed us, this boy," Shlomo Amir told a friend that night. Their son hoped he had destroyed the Middle East peace process too.