Father given 2 life sentences for murdering daughters

Beersheba’s District Court on Tuesday sentenced a man to two life terms after he was found guilty of strangling his two young daughters to death.

Ali Amtirat, 40, continued to insist that he was innocent and was framed by his wife for the murder of their children.

The bodies of Asinad, 4, and Rimas, 2, were found hanging from the ceiling at their family home in the Bedouin village of al-Fora’a, in May 2013.

Amtirat fled and was eventually taken into custody six weeks later after he was discovered hiding in a cave near the Dead Sea.

“The accused murdered in cold blood two young girls, cutting off their lives as they were just beginning,” the judges summarized during their sentencing. “It is hard to understand how a father, who is naturally supposed to protect his children from any injury, decides to end the lives of his children in an alarming and horrifying manner. The defendant took the lives of children, so young in age, in a malicious way that was planned and deliberate and all to get back at his wife.”

In August the court found Amtirat guilty of double homicide by strangulation.

The gruesome case gained national notoriety for police inadequacy — and led to the dismissal of senior police figures at the Arad station — after it was revealed that the girls’ mother, Abir Dandis, filed a complaint there against Amtirat just one day before the murders. The mother had also filed at least five complaints against her husband at the Ma’ale Adumim police station, stating she feared for her and her daughters’ safety.

Dandis has filed a civil suit of some NIS 5 million ($1.4 million) against the police, the Public Security Ministry, and the Arad station for what she called a “lack of care, an unwillingness to listen, arrogance, incivility and a lack of readiness to act to protect citizens.”

In May 2013, then-Israel Police chief Yohanan Danino dismissed Arad police station commander Yoni Zeitek, after an investigation into the murder of the girls near the southern city revealed “low standards” of conduct by police, who failed to act on the mother’s complaint.

In addition, Danino dismissed the station’s sub-commander and head of investigations. He also reprimanded other officers involved in the case, including the investigator who had heard testimony from the girls’ mother.

In May 2013, three of Amtirat’s siblings were arrested for kidnapping the mother’s brother and blackmailing her into returning the girls, after she had fled with them in an attempt to protect them.