Public security minister ‘shocked and appalled’ by weekend spate of killings
Six Israelis were murdered on Friday and Saturday
After a particularly violent weekend in which six people were killed throughout Israel, Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovich spoke out against the spate of murders, vowing to wage war against perpetrators of violent crimes.
Aharonovich visited Michal Vichman, the widow of slain Beersheba resident Gadi Vichman, and told her, “I am shocked and appalled by the painful murder cases that occurred in recent days. The incomprehensible ease with which criminals take the lives of others cannot continue. I will do everything to fight such incidents.”
Vichman, 36, the father of two young children, was stabbed to death outside his apartment building on Friday night after he asked local teens to stop making noise. Vichman’s widow stated that the Beersheba police did not respond to her first emergency call, a charge that local police refuted. The police report on the incident stated that a patrol car was sent to the neighborhood, but that the officers found no disturbance in the area.
“Whoever killed [Gadi] should be killed, no matter their age,” Vichman told Israel Radio.
She also said the police would not let anyone tend to her husband as he lay dying.
“The officers who were here didn’t let the neighbors touch him to stem the flow of blood, [the officers] told them not to touch,” she told Army Radio. “The man was bleeding to death and they didn’t let anyone help, and they didn’t have any knowledge of how to help him.”
Aharonovich promised a thorough investigation into police conduct surrounding the incident, and an intensive search for the perpetrators, in order to bring them to justice.
In a related story, three teens were arrested early Sunday for suspected involvement in the violent stabbing death of a teenager in a public park in Rehovot late Saturday night. Eyewitness testimony linked them to the crime.
The victim, Orgil Muati, 17, died of his wounds in Kaplan Hospital in Rehovot.
On Friday evening a 24-year-old from the southern Bedouin village of Aroer was shot and killed in a family dispute.
Two other murders took place on Friday night. In the Tel Aviv suburb of Bat Yam, Roman Kadinsky, 26, was under house arrest when a man entered his home and shot him. In the northern Arab city of Nazareth, a 19-year-old was stabbed to death in the street in what police believe was a family dispute.
On Saturday morning in Rishon Lezion, a 24-year-old security guard shot and killed a former neighbor who he claims stole his wallet containing NIS 5,000. According to Maariv, the suspect called the police to say that he was outside the man’s home and told the dispatcher that he didn’t know what he would do. Four minutes later he called back to tell the police that he had shot the man.
