Man convicted of abducting and raping woman 15 years ago
Elhai Nidam broke into victim’s car and forced her into Ra’anana orchard where he assaulted her, court finds, based on 2nd-ever use of unique DNA technology
The Lod District Court convicted a man for the 2009 abduction and rape of a woman in central Israel, marking only the second time a unique DNA sampling technology has been utilized in this way.
Elhai Nidam, 40, from Kfar Saba, was found guilty on Sunday of breaking into the then-33-year-old woman’s car in adjacent Ra’anana, spraying her with an unidentified substance, tying her hands with a zip tie and pressing a sharp object to her back as he marched her to a nearby orchard, where he raped her, before fleeing the scene. He will be sentenced at a later date.
Nidam, who was indicted only a decade after the rape, denied the allegation, arguing that the time that elapsed made the evidence against him inadmissible, that he had been having consensual sex with another woman in the area, and that the rapist had planted DNA evidence against him at the scene of the crime.
Handing down the unanimous conviction, the three judges rejected Nidam’s arguments, ruling that his version was “baseless, filled with lies and contradictory.”
“It does not reasonably explain, or even cast reasonable doubt over, the convincing evidence laid before us,” they wrote.
The judges also accused Nidam of incriminating behavior. During the trial, Ynet reported, the prosecution said Nidam had tried to glean information from the police about the still-covert investigation, and told his mother that he would take his passport and flee the country if he were to rape a woman and fear he’d be caught.
Police cracked the case in 2019 using advanced DNA sampling methods.
With the technology, investigators were able to spot family relations within the police’s pool of DNA samples.
Police had initially sampled a relative of Nidam’s, ultimately leading to Nidam himself. Nidam’s DNA matched a sample found on the victim’s clothes.
The technology had been used just once before, to identify Daniel Nachmani as the man who sexually assaulted and murdered teenager Noa Eyal in 1998. In 2021, Nachmani was sentenced to life in prison.