Police detain three suspects in Tel Aviv group sex incident

Police on Wednesday detained three young men suspected of being involved in a group sex incident that occurred on a Tel Aviv beach two weeks ago. The police said they identified the woman involved and plan to question her as well.

The teenagers, aged 15 and 16, are suspected of public indecency (Hebrew-language video), for their alleged engagement in sexual activity in a public place in broad daylight. Police are treating the case as an issue of public indecency rather than gang rape since eyewitness reports indicate that the sexual activity was consensual, even though the woman was reportedly mentally ill.

“We’re talking about an event that the greater public did not deem necessary to report to the police. There was only one call to the police emergency hotline,” commander of the Yarkon District Brigadier Commander Yoram Ohayon told Army Radio.

The police is also investigating the conduct of the police call center operator who answered the eyewitness call about the incident, and reportedly did not know the location of the beach.

A witness to the sexual activity known only as N. claimed that the police never responded to her emergency call about the incident. Another eyewitness, Alex, told Yedioth Ahronoth that he did not see any police officers at the scene.

According to eyewitness reports in the Israeli media, a group of young people stood, watched and cheered as a woman engaged in sexual activity with at least six partners on Tel Aviv’s Bograshov beach in the early afternoon.

N., a Jerusalem resident who witnessed the group sex, said that after a brief conversation with the woman, who appeared to be in her 20s, it was clear that she was mentally disturbed, and that the men who were engaging in the sexual activity were aware of that. Therefore, she thought that the situation could be considered a gang rape.

“I tried to talk the girl into leaving, but she started screaming at me, and said ‘I’m a free woman, I’ll do what I want with my body.’ She was very aggressive and I didn’t want to start up with her,” said the witness.

N. said she called the police and reported the “indecent activity.” Police say they sent a patrol car to investigate, but did not see anything suspicious.

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Kobi Ganesh, who works at a nearby beach restaurant, told Yedioth Ahronoth that the woman appeared drunk, but not in distress: “Every once in a while she would take whoever would cooperate into the water and engage in a sexual act. I thought she probably works in this, or maybe she needed the money for something, so I stayed out of it. There were many families and children around and nobody did anything,” he said.

Another eyewitness, Liron, told Army Radio on Tuesday that the woman looked closer to 40 years old, and the men she was having sex with were teenagers approximately 16 years old.  She described the woman as sitting with a group of young men, all drinking alcoholic beverages, close to the entrance of a beachfront restaurant. She said that she and a friend saw the woman and one of the teenagers go into the knee-deep sea and have intercourse in the water, in full view of the onlookers on the beach, and then return to the beach to drink more. Liron said that she and her friend sat in complete shock watching the act, but did not think to interfere, since the woman was laughing and did not seem to be in any danger.

Liron was particularly shocked that the incident took place near the entrance of a restaurant, and that a woman in her 40s was cavorting with teenagers, but saw nothing wrong with the sex itself since the woman seemed a willing participant, despite being very inebriated.

N., who called the authorities, said the police could not have arrived on the scene since ”during the time those policemen claim they were at the scene, the girl was still walking around half-naked, having sex with those guys, and it isn’t clear how the policemen who claim to have been there didn’t see it.”

Despite the fact that numerous bystanders witnessed the sexual activity and reported the same facts to Haaretz, N. was apparently the only citizen to place a call to the authorities.

The police also said that N.’s call was the sole complaint received of the incident, and that it is “puzzling that after such a severe incident, we did not receive more complaints from citizens.”

Prof Yechiel Klar of Tel Aviv University told Army Radio on Tuesday that he thought the incident, as described by the eyewitnesses, was rape, but that he was unsurprised that additional people did not contact the authorities: “We look at other people, and when they do nothing, we do nothing… Tepsidoehis is a society that does not condone involvement when something is not clearly illegal or harmful.”