Eritrean man yelled ‘Allahu Akbar,’ claims guard who shot him
Police say no evidence Haftom Zarhum, who was assaulted by mob after being mistaken for terrorist, shouted in Arabic during Beersheba attack
A security guard at the Beersheba central bus station claimed during a police investigation that he mistook an Eritrean asylum seeker for a terrorist and shot the man during Sunday’s deadly attack at the site after the latter shouted “Allahu Akbar,” an Arabic phrase meaning “God is great,” the Walla news site reported Friday.
Islamist extremists often call out the phrase before or as they carry out terrorist acts.
According to Walla, police investigators disputed the guard’s version of the events, stressing that based on evidence gathered so far, the Eritrean national had not been heard shouting the phrase by any other witnesses to the incident.
Twenty-nine-year-old Haftom Zarhum died in Soroka Hospital in Beersheba after he was shot by the security officer, and then brutally beaten by a mob at the site of the attack. A video from the incident showed Zarhum fleeing the scene, only to be gunned down and then kicked repeatedly in the head by a crowd — including two soldiers — in the bus station. Pathologists later determined the cause of death was internal bleeding from a gunshot wound, not the repeated blows to the head he subsequently suffered.
In footage from the mob attack posted online later in the week, one off-duty soldier can be seen running up to Zarhum and kicking him in the face as he flails in a pool of his own blood. The soldier can then be seen repeatedly stomping on Zarhum’s head. The soldier only stops when a security guard pushes him away.
Some in the crowd can be heard shouting “kill him, kill him” and “die already, son of a bitch.” Toward the end of the clip some start chanting “Am Yisrael Chai,” Hebrew for “The people of Israel live.”
The graphic video was posted on the Channel 10 website.
Four suspects in the beating, including two members of the Israel Prison Service, were arrested by police Wednesday for aggravated assault.
The four were released on bail Thursday and have been banned from making contact with one another.
The head of the Israel Prison Service condemned the alleged actions of its employees, saying that “violence contradicts the values of the organization.”
The IDF said Monday that the military police was also taking part in the investigation of the incident, as several suspects were soldiers.
Some 2,000 people attended a memorial event for Zarhum in Tel Aviv on Wednesday.
One IDF soldier, Omri Levy, died and 11 other people were injured in the stabbing and shooting attack at the southern city’s crowded central bus station Sunday. Police named the terrorist as 21-year-old Muhanad Alukabi from near the Bedouin town of Hura, just east of Beersheba.
The attack on Zarhum met with widespread outrage, with the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper reporting that he was shot “only because of the color of his skin.”