Arrests of Lynching Suspects
After he assumed office, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ordered the Israeli security services to find and arrest the lynchers. Israel subsequently tracked down those responsible:
- Aziz Salha was arrested in 2001. He admitted to being one of those who broke in to the police station and choking one of the soldiers while others beat him bloody. When he saw that his hands were covered with the soldier's blood, he went to the window and proudly displayed his blood-stained hands to the mob below, and was photographed while doing so. In 2004, an Israeli court convicted him for the murder of Corporal Vadim Nurzhitz and sentenced him to life imprisonment. In October 2011 he was controversially released as part of the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange.
- Muhammad Howara, a Tanzim activist, was arrested in 2001. He admitted breaking into the police station and stabbing one of the soldiers.
- Ziad Hamdada, a Fatah Tanzim operative who set fire to the body of one of the Israeli reservists, was arrested in 2002. He had also participated in and planned other terrorist attacks.
- Mohamed Abu Ida, a former member of the Palestinian police force in Ramallah, was arrested by Shin Bet in 2005. During the investigation, he admitted to having had led the two Israeli soldiers to the Ramallah police station after which he joined the other rioters.
- Wisam Radi, a Palestinian policeman, was arrested by Israeli security forces and indicted before a military court in 2005 for killing Yosef Avrahami and abusing the body of Vadim Nurzhitz. In 2010, he was acquitted of Avrahami's murder on grounds that a critical piece of evidence was inadmissible in court. He was, however, convicted of mutilating Nurzhitz's body and sentenced to seven years in prison. An appellate court later overturned the decision not to convict him of murder following an appeal by the military prosecution.
- Haiman Zabam, a Tanzim operative, was arrested by Israeli paratroopers on September 26, 2007. He had been planning additional attacks on Israel.
- Marwan Ibrahim Tawfik Maadi and Yasser Ibrahim Mohammed Khatab, two Hamas members, were arrested by Shin Bet and Israeli Police during the breakup of a Hamas network in Ramallah and the Binyamin region. During the interrogation, they confessed to participating in the lynching, and in August 2012, they were indicted before a military court.
Read more about this topic: 2000 Ramallah Lynching
Famous quotes containing the words arrests, lynching and/or suspects:
“On our streets it is the sight of a totally unknown face or figure which arrests the attention, rather than, as in big cities, the strangeness of occasionally seeing someone you know.”
—For the State of Vermont, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“No reporter of my generation, whatever his genius, ever really rated spats and a walking stick until he had covered both a lynching and a revolution.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)