American tourist says she was raped in Jaffa market
Two men arrested and accused of assaulting woman in back of store
Stuart Winer is a breaking news editor at The Times of Israel.
Two men were arrested Wednesday after an American tourist alleged she was raped while shopping in the popular Jaffa flea market in Tel Aviv.
Details of the arrest of one man from Ra’anana, 39, and another from Holon, 44, were released on Thursday.
The woman, 25, told investigators she was walking through the market on Monday when she entered one of the stores. Once inside, the alleged attacker forced her into a room at the back of the premises where he raped her. He then took her to an adjacent shop where together with the second suspect they performed indecent acts on her, she said.
News of the attack came on the heels of a sentencing in a brutal raping in Tel Aviv from a year earlier.
On Wednesday the Tel Aviv Regional Court sentenced Ahmed Bani Jaber, 21, a Palestinian from the West Bank town of Nablus, to 30 years in prison for an attack on a teenage girl and her boyfriend in Tel Aviv in March. Jaber forced the couple to engage in sex acts in the toilet of an underground parking lot before raping the girl and then performing indecent acts on her. Jaber was also ordered to pay NIS 250,000 ($69,000) to each of his victims.
At the beginning of the week police arrested two men on suspicion of raping two teenage girls in a club in Tel Aviv earlier this month. The men are accused of raping the two girls, both 17, after they passed out from excessive drinking at the club.