Israel – Husein Ben Yusef Halifa, 34 of Ibillin in the Galilee, was indicted for the alleged murder of Shelly Dadon on Wednesday with the motive still being inconclusive.
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The Northern District Attorney’s Office filed the indictment in the Nazareth District Court, which also included charges for illegal possession of a knife and obstruction of justice.
The indictment follows Sunday’s dramatic announcement by the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) that it had solved the murder of the 19-year-old from Afula, nearly a month after it arrested the man it said carried out the grisly murder.
According to the Shin Bet, on June 16 it arrested Hassin Yussef Hasin Halifa, a taxi driver from Ibillin, on suspicion of carrying out the murder on the night of May 1.
Though Halifa was arrested weeks ago, news of his arrest and confession were only publicized Sunday, after the Israeli media began covering the arrest of a group of Jews for allegedly murdering a Palestinian teen in a nationalistic crime last week.
The Shin Bet said Sunday that Halifa confessed to the crime and described details of the murder that weren’t publicly known.
The security service said Halifa picked Dadon up after he had dropped off some workers in the industrial district of Migdal Ha’emek. Around 8:00 a.m., she asked for a ride to her job interview nearby, and Halifa offered to take her, but on the way stopped at a deserted parking lot and stabbed her to death.
The indictment described a gruesome scene from a horror movie in which Halifa repeatedly stabbed Dadon in virtually every area of her body.
Dadon struggled to escape and even scratched Halifa, but was not physically strong enough to get away, said the indictment.
The indictment stated that Halifa tossed Dadon’s cellphone out the window as he was driving away from the area and sometime later also tossed her wallet near the Arab village of Beit Zarzir.
Halifa allegedly tried to cover up the murder by washing the blood off of his cab. Not long after the murder, the wallet was found by a group of local youth, who used Dadon’s credit card, leading to their arrest and the first statement by Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch that there’d been a “dramatic development in the case” and that the crime was most likely nationalistic. Those six suspects, including minors, were released not long after without charge.
Since then police cooled on the assessment it was a nationalistic crime, though the Shin Bet said Sunday that while it still hasn’t been able to fully clarify the motive for the murder “our assessment is it was for nationalistic reasons.”
The murder was followed by protests held by Dadon’s family, calling for security services to find the killers, but also for Israel to end the practice of releasing convicted murderers in exchange for kidnapped Israelis.
Content is provided courtesy of the Jerusalem Post
Nonsense that the motive was unclear. When the animal was arrested he said he did it for nationalistic reasons.
Maybe i missed it, has anyone heard anything from the occupant of the White House? Mr. Kerry? Anyone? How about the UN? Um, Mr Cameron? Are you there? Anti Semitic trash.
Where are the Jewish riots?