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JERUSALEM - Disgraced former Israeli president Moshe Katsav was a "serial sex offender," Israel's attorney general said Saturday as thousands protested against a plea deal whereby he will avoid rape charges.
The almost year-long probe into a litany of sex charges, including several rape accusations, "revealed a constant pattern of behaviour by Moshe Katsav in his different offices," Menachem Mazuz said in a television interview.
"We met a president and realised that we were facing a man who had acted over the years as a serial sex offender," he told Channel Two television.
The 61-year-old Iranian-born Katsav resigned from office Friday after he signed a plea bargain with prosecutors the previous day that will see him convicted of sexual offences but escape jail for alleged rape.
Mazuz said the state decided to drop rape charges, filed by several women, due to a lack of "sufficiently solid evidence."
The deal sparked a wave of outrage and police said over 5,000 people, rallied by women's groups and victims of sex attacks, demonstrated in Tel Aviv Saturday to demand the scrapping of the plea bargain.
Prosecutors will file an indictment against Katsav at the Jerusalem magistrate's court on Sunday, at the same time that women's groups were slated to appeal to Israel's Supreme Court against the deal.
- AFP /ls
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