An Israeli court convicted two Israeli teens for the 2014 murder of Mohammad Abu Khdeir, but their ringleader evaded a conviction due to a surprise insanity plea.
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Israeli media said the Palestinian’s death was a “revenge killing” following the burial of teenagers Gilad Sha’ar, Naftali Frenkel and Eyal Yifrach, who were kidnaped and murdered in the West Bank.
Mohammed Abu Khdeir was abducted outside his home in Shuafat in East Jerusalem and driven to a forest, where he was burned alive on July 2, 2014.
The judge determined that Ben David drove the vehicle while his two accomplices beat Abu Khdeir unconscious in the back seat. A third suspect, Hamas member Hussam Qawasmeh, was found guilty of their murders in January of this year and given three life sentences.
An autopsy at Israel’s Abu Kabir Forensic Institute in the presence of a Palestinian pathologist found that the boy had been burned alive. “I am afraid in that the court will release them (the suspects) in the end”.
Suha (C), the mother of Palestinian teenager Muhammad Abu Khdeir, who was murdered previous year, sits in the district court in Jerusalem on November 30, 2015.
While a panel of judges stated that Ben-David had committed the murder, the court accepted a petition to consider a claim of insanity, and a new hearing was scheduled for December 20. The unrest-crackdown dialogue between Palestinians and Israeli security forces has now been going on for well over a year.
“The court has today ruled that the three accused had carried out… the barbaric crime of kidnapping an innocent person, only because of his origin, and burned him to death”, Korb said.
A widespread perception of discrimination in the Israeli legal system, however, has not stopped other families of Palestinians killed by Israelis from filing legal cases.
In a separate development Tuesday, an Israeli court sentenced an Israeli man to three years in prison for setting fire to a bilingual Hebrew-Arabic school in Jerusalem last year.
Ben David as well as reenacted the grisly homicide for investigators, according to authorities and the two unnamed minors admitted to the offense. Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon has said the suspects were known have not been arrested to protect intelligence sources.
In keeping with Israeli law, the two 18-year-olds convicted were not named because the crime took place and the trial began when they were minors.
Within a day, the two minors had also confessed and reenacted the murder for the police.
Hamas condemned what it called an “exoneration” of Ben David. A Palestinian attempted to stab a pedestrian at a busy junction outside of Jerusalem when Israeli troops shot and killed him, military said. “When we try to claim we are better than our enemies … we will always have this incident as a mirror”, Corb said.
Of those, 56 are said by Israel to have been attackers.
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“The court behaves one way with Arabs and another way with Jews”, Hussein Abu Khdeir told reporters outside the court, calling the last-minute psychiatric report by Yosef Haim Ben-David’s lawyers a “trick” and asking why it was not submitted earlier.
