Police investigating Tel Aviv ‘lynch’

A 40-year-old Tel Aviv municipal worker claimed Sunday that he was brutally attacked by a group of 15 drunk youths on the city’s boardwalk the previous night. Hassan Ausruf, an Arab Israeli, said the youths kicked him and broke bottles on his head while shouting racial epithets at him.

“They shouted things like ‘f**kin’ Arab’ and ‘get your own country,’ ” said Ausruf, a sanitation worker for the city.

Ausruf required dozens of stitches and doctors were doing their best Sunday evening to save his eye, which suffered severe damage from the beating.

“It was a lynch plain and simple,” said a coworker who found Ausruf bleeding on the side of the road early Sunday morning.

Police had yet to make any arrests, but expressed confidence they would find some of the perpetrators; they discovered fingerprints on some of the bottles, and the youths were captured on a security camera fleeing the scene of the beating. After detaining suspects, the police will determine whether the attack was racially motivated, or the action of out-of-hand Purim revelers.