Man gets 4 months in jail over lynching of Eritrean mistaken for terrorist

The Beersheba District Court hands a four-month prison sentence to Evyatar Dimri, an Israeli man convicted last month for his role in the 2015 lynching of an Eritrean migrant who was mistaken for a Palestinian terrorist.

The relatively lenient punishment comes after the charge was downgraded as part of a plea bargain.

Haftom Zarhum, 29, an innocent bystander, was shot by a security guard in the minutes after a terror attack at the Beersheba bus station on October 18, 2015 that left an Israeli soldier dead and 11 people wounded.

As he lay bleeding on the ground, a crowd of angry passersby — believing him to be the terrorist — beat him, some of them delivering powerful blows to his head and pummeling him with a metal bench. He died hours later in a hospital, and an autopsy ruled that the primary cause of death was the gunshot wounds.

Dimri was caught on security cameras kicking Zarhum twice. He was originally charged with “causing injury with grave intent,” an offense potentially carrying a punishment of up to 20 years in jail. But in the plea bargain, Dimri confessed to “abusing the helpless,” a lesser crime carrying a maximum prison sentence of seven years, Hebrew-language media reported.

The prosecution reportedly only requested that Dimri serve several months behind bars.