THE BEASTS WHO BURNED 16 YEAR OLD PALESTINIAN, MOHAMMED ABU KHDER ALIVE!
by Barry Grossman*
The name of the lead killer in the brutal 2 July murder of Palestinian teenager Mohammed Abu Khder from Shuafat, in northern Jerusalem, is 29 year old Yosef Haim Ben-David. He is a Jerusalem-area resident from the community of Adam where he owns an optical shop.
The other two charged in the indictment are 16-year-old ultra-Orthodox Jews, one of whom studies in a yeshiva, or religious seminary, and another who dropped out of yeshiva studies.
All three were relatives and all three have confessed to the killing while they re-enacted it during their police interrogation. The day after he was arrested, Ben David’s father is quoted as saying that “Whoever did this was mentally ill.”
The indictment also charged two of the defendants with the attempted kidnapping of a seven-year-old Palestinian boy in Beit Hanina the night before the murder, an attempt to burn Palestinian cars, and arson against a Palestinian store in the West Bank village of Hizme in June.
The indictment says that a day before killing Abu Khdeir, they went riding through the neighbourhood looking for possible targets when one suspect got out of the group’s car, grabbed a 7 year old boy in a chokehold and tried to drag him to the vehicle. The boy’s mother screamed and struggled with the attacker, who beat her and fled. The suspects then made an unsuccessful attempt to set two cars on fire in another Arab neighbourhood but sped off after they were spotted by residents.
The indictment said that after the funeral of the slain Israeli following their initial failed attempt to abduct an “Arab,” the 3 killers prepared for what they ultimately did to the 16 year old Mohammed Abu Khder by buying plastic handcuffs and filling bottles with gasoline at a service station.
Later, to mask their identities, the two younger suspects changed out of clothes identifying them as Orthodox Jews and removed their skullcaps. After midnight, they went on a “man hunt” and drove for three hours in Arab neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem in search of someone they could easily overpower and shove into their car. Fortified by energy drinks and cigarettes bought to lift their spirits after futile attempts to find a victim, the suspects eventually spotted Abu Khdeir.
While scouting out potential victims, they spoke with various children, but decided not to abduct them and briefly considered kidnapping an adult. They decided that a girl or woman would scream too much. The three then saw Abu Khdeir sitting on the side, and approached him to determine if he was a Palestinian.
They asked him for directions to Tel Aviv and Damascus Gate, and he began to respond before growing suspicious and attempting to call his friends for help. The defendants then grabbed the struggling teenager and, covering his mouth to stifle his screams, pushed him into the car where they beat him with a tire iron.
They “cruelly kidnapped and murdered the minor Muhammed Abu Khdeir simply for being an Arab.” They later doused him with petrol which they also poured into his mouth and burned him alive. The autopsy report said that he died from massive internal burns. After cleaning the back seat of the car, two of the assailants returned at dawn to the home of the older suspect in Adam, where, the indictment says, “they played guitars and went to sleep.”
The indictment said the older suspect, who Israeli news reports have said is 29, and one of the younger ones have obsessive compulsive disorders and are on psychiatric medications. Abu Khdeir’s father, Hussein, said after the murder that the men would claim to be insane. Indeed, local media reported this week that two of the men would be submitting insanity pleas and a defence lawyer provided for Ben David by Zionist legal aid organization Honenu stated that his defence will be pleading temporary insanity at the time of the murder.
Though Muhammad Abu Khdeir has been officially declared a victim of terrorism, unlike the family homes of the two Palestinian suspects mysteriously named as suspects in the earlier death of three Jewish teenagers, the family home of the the three Jews charged with murdering Muhammad Abu Khdeir have not been demolished.
The charred body of Muhammad Abu Khdeir, 16, was found in a wooded area on July 2 and his brutal murder set off days of rioting in East Jerusalem neighbourhoods and in Israeli Arab towns, where youths faced off against police, burning tires and hurling stones and Molotov cocktails.
The Palestinian response to these riots and to the earlier heavy handed tactics of Israeli security forces who it was disingenuously claimed were looking for the three Israeli teenagers who it has since been learned were known by the authorities to be dead, was used as the pretence for launching a sustained military bombardment of Gaza which to date has resulted in the brutal deaths of more than 700 men, women and children, more than 4,000 casualties as well as the destruction of countless homes and vast swaths of essential civilian infrastructure. (T/BG/E01)
Mi’raj Islamic News Agency (MINA)
(from: various sources)
*Barry Grossman is an international lawyer. He received his B.Comm. from the University of Calgary in 1984 and an LLB from York University’s Osgoode Hall Law School in 1987. After working as a litigator at a major commercial law firm in Toronto, he was recruited to teach at the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Law in Australia. He later worked for several years as a commercial litigation consultant to the national firm of Freehill, Hollingdale & Page before later taking up a full time lectureship at Monash University’s Faculty of Law. Mr. Grossman has written extensively on various legal subjects and is a frequent commentator on political affairs. He is often interviewed by Press TV and Sahar TV.He has resided in Indonesia since 1999 and spent long periods of time in several countries, including Germany, Canada, the United States, Mexico, Australia and Thailand. Mr. Grossman is a Muslim.
This article was written for the Indonesian based international news service, Mi’raj Islamic News Agency (MINA) as requested by MINA Deputy Editor-in-Chief II, Syarif Hidayat.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of MINA.