New footage emerges of Tel Aviv gunman dancing at wedding

Nashat Milhem also seen participating in a quiz, in video circulated 8 days after he was killed by police and 2 weeks after he shot dead 3 people

New footage has emerged showing Nashat Milhem, the gunman who shot dead three people in Tel Aviv two weeks ago, dancing and chatting at a wedding not long before he carried out his deadly shooting spree.

Channel 2 television reported Saturday that the footage, which it said has been widely circulated online, is of two separate occasions. In the first, Milhem can be seen participating in some form of street quiz during the Muslim fast month of Ramadan. He correctly answers a question about Islam, for which he is awarded a crate of soft drinks.

In the second part of the video, Milhem can be seen laughing and dancing at a wedding several months ago, reportedly alongside some of the relatives arrested as suspected accomplices in the week between his disappearance from Tel Aviv after the shooting and his discovery in his hometown of Arara in northern Israel.

Milhem was killed on January 8 in a shootout with police outside a home in Arara, where it later emerged he had been hiding since fleeing Tel Aviv exactly a week earlier. Local residents said that it had been known that the gunman had gone to ground in the town, and that some relatives had been helping him, although no one had been willing to report his presence to the police.

The gunman’s father and brother had appealed to Milhem to give himself up after he killed 26-year-old Alon Bakal and Shimon Ruimi, 30, at Simta Bar on Dizengoff Street, and later shot dead Bedouin taxi driver Amin Shaaban, a father of 11 from Lod whose cab he stole as he made his getaway.

Mohammed Milhem, the gunman’s father, had called the police after recognizing his son on security camera footage of the New Year’s Day attack at Simta. When he later learned that Nashat Milhem was hiding in Arara, he gave his state-appointed lawyer permission to notify the authorities.