Haifa, Israel – The Haifa District Attorney’s Office on Sunday filed an indictment with the Haifa District court against two men for causing an explosion atop a five-story building in Akko, making three floors collapse and killing five people on February 17.
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According to the indictment, Mohammed Jarhi and Omer Haluani, charged with multiple murders and other crimes, caused the explosion in order to eliminate an antenna on the building’s rooftop.
A third man, Zecharya Zeiri, is also named in the indictment as having caused the explosion, however, his injuries from the explosion have left him hospitalized such that there may be no indictment unless he recovers.
The indictment said that in the past nearby residents had requested Ahmad Badar, who owned the rooftop, to remove the antenna, which they claimed was causing a number of local children in the area to get sick with cancer.
Lower-grade but somewhat violent past attempts had even been made to tear the antenna down or burn it, said the indictment.
The indictment alleged that the three men approached the building from a high floor on a nearby building where one of them resided.
They poured flammable materials into the apartment unit which the antenna was on top of and lit the materials, said the indictment.
The size of the subsequent fire and explosion appears to have caught even the defendants by surprise as all of them were caught in the explosion and falling debree, including needing to be rescued from the rubble.
At the time, touring the site, Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch said “the circumstances of the blast are being examined and there are a number of different angles we are checking, including the criminal angle, [or] that this was caused by exploding gas canisters or even issues with the weather.”
By mid-afternoon after the explosion, as the shop owners in the market shut their doors early, in an act of mourning, the victims were named as Muhammad Bader, 43, and his wife, Hanan, 38; Najah Sarhan, 51, and her husband, Riak, 55, as well as their son Nasser, 8.
Magen David Adom described a rescue operation that sent paramedics racing on foot through the alleyways, holding whatever they could carry from the ambulances to the blast site.
At the scene, which they described as resembling an earthquake, they worked alongside soldiers from the IDF Home Front Command and the “Oketz” canine unit, officers from the Israel Police and the Border Patrol and municipality officials.
The antenna sat atop the building after the Acre municipality got rid of most of the pirate cellular antennas in the Old City in recent years.
The antennas were put up, residents say, to deal with the spotty reception in the serpentine alleyways of the ancient city, with building owners receiving payment from cellular companies to put up the rooftop antennas.
At the famous al-Jazzar mosque not far away, dozens of men milled around in the plaza, where food in large pots on hot plates provided by the Islamic Waqf was being served to relatives of the killed and well-wishers. Among the mourners was Osama Gazawe, a former deputy mayor of Acre, whose cousin Najah was killed in the blast.
“We’ve never had a disaster like this in Acre. It’s a blow to the entire city,” Gazawe said, adding that Jews, Christians and Druze as well as Muslims had come by the mosque to pay their respects.
The prosecution asked to have the defendants remanded to police custody until the end of the proceedings.