Man shot in Beersheba bank rampage says police fired at him
Seriously injured Bedouin tells reporters he only survived by playing dead

Omar Wallid, who was seriously injured in a murderous rampage at a Beersheba bank last week, claimed on Thursday that it was the police — and not the murderous assailant, Itamar Alon — who shot him.
On May 20, Alon killed four people and injured three others before taking his own life at a neighborhood branch of Bank Hapoalim. Security footage at the time showed an injured Wallid being escorted from the bank in handcuffs, suspected of being one of the shooters.
On Thursday, Wallid told reporters in his room at Beersheba’s Soroka Medical Center that Alon did not shoot him, and that “he thought I was dead.”
Wallid was in the bank that day with his friend — one of the fatalities, Idan Savri — who planned to open an account. When the shooting started, Wallid told reporters, they hid behind a table with a third person, Ramu Vaknin. Wallid suffered two bullet wounds while sheltering Vaknin. “He saved my life with his body,” Vaknin said.
“I just lay there, as if I was dead,” Wallid recalled. “He [Alon] looked at me, I saw him … and I just pretended that I was dead.”
When Alon took a hostage with him into the restroom, Wallid tried to flee the bank. It was then, he said, that the police shot him.
“After seven minutes, I started to make my exit from the bank, and I was 100% healthy,” Wallid said. “That’s when the police began to shoot at me.”
The police vehemently denied Wallid’s accusation. According to a police statement, Wallid’s testimony does not fit the ballistic analysis and the evidence findings at the bank.
On Thursday evening, police visited Wallid in his hospital room to question him concerning his testimony. A confrontation broke out with members of Wallid’s family, and some of them were arrested. No further details were available.
Earlier on Thursday, Vaknin, whose life Wallid saved during the attack, came to visit him and to thank him. “As of today,” Vaknin told him, “you and I are family.”
Wallid’s family charged that Wallid was mistreated because he is Bedouin. “For a long time, Omar was lying handcuffed while everyone thought he was a terrorist, because he’s a Bedouin man from Rahat,” Hayman Wallid, the victim’s brother, told Yedioth Ahronoth the day after the attack.
Maj.-Gen. Yoram Halevy, police commander of the southern district, claimed at the time that the police did not know Wallid was a Bedouin when they handcuffed him and that a second, Jewish, man was also taken away in handcuffs.
On Thursday, a police spokesperson said that when the police arrived on the scene, “it was unclear if the crime was nationalistic or criminal, so anyone who the policemen thought looked suspicious was handcuffed.”
But Wallid’s brothers say that, in addition to shooting Omar four times, they also beat him.
A senior police source told Channel 2 news that, based on ballistic tests conducted at the bank, they found that the police only fired two shots during the incident. One of the bullets was lodged in the door of the bathroom stall where Alon was holding his hostage, and the second went into a plant, which was nowhere near where Wallid was hiding under a table.
In addition, police said that they have an eyewitness who saw Itamar Alon fire his gun in the direction of Wallid.
According to Channel 2, the police source had very harsh words for Wallid: They said that, rather than making baseless claims against the police, he should be thanking them for arriving so quickly and getting him to the hospital right away, so that he could receive the care that saved his life.
“Everything connected to claims of police violence will be reviewed by the police investigations department,” the police said on Thursday. “If it becomes clear that the officers used unnecessary force, they will be dealt with.”