Court stays ‘double suicide’ autopsy, giving police day to show new suspect

The High Court delayed Tuesday a police autopsy of Baruch Indig and Odelia Bachar, who were found dead this week in an Eilat hotel room, accepting the petition of the family against the move and giving police just 24 hours to prove they have a living person suspected in their deaths.

Police had originally argued that initial findings suggested the possibility of a murder-suicide rather than a double suicide. But the court accepted the argument, presented by the Indig and Bachar families, that an autopsy in such a case could violate Jewish law as it would not lead to the arrest of a killer at large.

Presenting a new claim that has not been publicly made by police, however, the state argued that there may be an additional suspect and therefore required the autopsy to determine if there had been foul play, a representative of the families told The Times of Israel.

Judges gave police 24 hours to back up their claims before the bodies are buried, finally ending the possibility of postmortems.

Indig and Bachar, both in their 20s, were found dead Sunday morning by staff in the Herod’s Hotel Eilat after they failed to check out on time. Entering room 301, where the two had been staying over the weekend, staff found both bodies lying on the bed alongside a suicide note in their names.

But despite telltale signs pointing to a double suicide, police opened an investigation into other potential causes for their deaths.

“On the face of it there is no criminal suspicion, but the case obligates us to investigate all possible angles,” Israel Police spokesperson Luba Samri said on Monday.

Police didn’t comment on the cause of death.

Police had claimed that initial medical examinations showed a disparity in the times of the deaths of Indig and Bachar, with some reports pointing to a gap of days. Bachar was estimated to have died some time overnight Thursday, just hours after the two entered the room on Thursday, while Indig may not have died until Saturday morning, Channel 10 reported.

The bodies were transferred to the Abu Kabir Medical Center to determine the cause of death, Samri said, where police were hoping to carry out full autopsies.

But the ultra-Orthodox families of Indig and Bachar protested the move, first unsuccessfully petitioning the Eilat Magistrate’s Court on Monday, and then turning to the High Court Tuesday.

In court Tuesday, the families’ lawyers countered the police claim of a third suspect by pointing to CCTV footage of the corridor outside room 301, which appeared to show no evidence of anyone else entering the room. Police said they had yet to review all the footage.

“We will now have to assess how to continue the investigation,” a police spokesperson told The Times of Israel after Tuesday’s court decision.

Michael Gutvin, the coordinator of the legal department for the emergency response organization ZAKA, which is representing the families, called the police claim of an additional suspect “a desperate attempt to cling to an autopsy” that would only cause the families additional and unnecessary distress.

Indig and Bachar both came from ultra-Orthodox families but had left the Orthodox fold in recent years.

Indig, 26, had served in the army as a radio host and producer for Army Radio until he was discharged a year and a half ago. He had previously worked for the ultra-Orthodox radio station Kol Hai.

In December last year, Indig was charged with several accounts of online harassment with sexual intent. He was accused of hacking into the Facebook and email accounts of numerous women and soldiers working alongside him at Army Radio. In several instances he was accused of downloading and sharing intimate photos of his colleagues.

In the past year Indig also shared a number of posts on Facebook detailing sexual harassment he suffered at the hands of an educator as a child from the age of 8.

“You ruined my life. Me and many other children who you hurt,” he wrote in a November post describing his feelings of despair as a young boy. “You forever put out the light of what I could have been.”

Other posts reveled deep-held feelings of depression and loneliness, particularly after the charges were made public.

According to her Facebook page, Bachar worked at the Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem.

On Thursday the two updated their statuses on the social media platform to “in a relationship” with each other.

At 1:14 a.m. Friday, hours before Bachar is said to have died, Indig uploaded a photo of the two together, setting it as his final profile image. At 1:27 a.m., Bachar did the same.