Jerusalem – Security officials say that 29-year-old Arafat Irfayia from Hebron has confessed to the killing of 19-year-old Ori Anspacher, and reconstructed the murder for police on Sunday morning ahead of his arraignment in court.
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IDF troops meanwhile mapped the killer’s home ahead of its likely demolition. Troops entered Hebron in the pre-dawn hours on Sunday in order to measure the structure “to evaluate ways to demolish it,” the army said in a statement.
Irfayia was arrested near Ramallah less than 48 hours after Ori Ansbacher, from the West Bank settlement of Tekoa, was found naked and with multiple stab wounds in the Ein Yael forest in Jerusalem on Thursday.
The Shin Bet General Security Service said that the suspect “left his home in Hebron with a knife and made his way to the village of Beit Jala,” just south of Jerusalem and from there, he “walked to the forest, where he saw Ori, attacked and murdered her.”
Irfayia was arrested in a joint operation by the Israel Defense Forces, the Shin Bet security service and the Israel Border Police’s YAMAM counter-terrorism unit in an abandoned building near the near the Jamal Abdel-Nasser Mosque in the el-Bireh area of Ramallah following intelligence received by security forces.
According to reports, authorities received intelligence that he was hiding in the mosque and proceeded to raid it on Friday evening. When Irfayia was not found, troops confiscated security camera footage from the neighborhood and returned later that night to conduct a second raid on the nearby abandoned building where he was arrested without putting up a struggle.
The knife he is believed to have used in the murder was found during the arrest. With the Israel Police, Shin Bet general security service and IDF still investigating her murder, many details remain under a gag order and Ansbacher’s murder has not yet officially been classified as a terror attack.
Irfayia had previously served time for being in Israel illegally and for possession of a knife, and according to reports authorities were able to identify him as the murder suspect “without question” from DNA evidence found at the scene.
While there is growing suspicion that her murder was nationalistic as Irfayia has family members connected with Hamas and he has been involved in disseminating propaganda for the group, Israel’s Channel 12 news reported Saturday night police are still checking whether the attack was sexual in nature.
“The interrogation of the suspect is ongoing and is focused in particular on the motives for the murder,” read a statement by police. Meanwhile Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan said the attack should be considered a terror attack regardless of what Irfayia says during his interrogation.
“When an illegal Palestinian alien commits a murder of a Jew in the State of Israel, this unequivocally must be determined as a nationalistic murder, no matter what he says or does not say in his interrogation. I hope that the competent authorities understand this, and if not, it should be legislated,” he said.
“We have to remember with what lowly and murderous people we are talking to about agreements and processes. This is a very broad phenomenon of terrorism that we deal with. This is a people whose cultural codes are murderous.”