State sues kidnapping hoaxers for NIS 625,000
Niv Asraf and Eran Nagauker also face criminal charges for faking disappearance, sparking massive army and police manhunt
The police and the Defense Ministry on Thursday sued two Beersheba men who faked a kidnapping in April and were found after an exhaustive — and expensive — search operation.
The state prosecution seeks NIS 625,000 ($160,690) from Niv Asraf and Eran Nagauker “for financial damage caused to the state due to the defendants’ conduct.”
Nagauker, Asraf’s friend and accomplice, called police just after 4 p.m. on Thursday, April 2, and reported that Asraf had entered the Palestinian village of Beit Anun, near Hebron, and hadn’t returned. Police officers and IDF troops launched a massive manhunt in the area to try and locate Asraf, only to discover his “disappearance” was a hoax.
Asraf and Nagauker “faked the kidnapping of Asraf and caused large military and police forces to be scrambled in search of the ‘captive’ for no real reason,” the indictment reads. The sum “does not reflect the entire sum the state spent and the economic damage inflicted as a direct result of the conduct of the defendants is significantly higher than the sum sought” in court, the indictment noted.
Asraf and Nagauker were charged earlier this year for submitting false information and other offenses which are considered criminal and may carry jail terms.
The new indictment alleges that the two young men planned the faked kidnapping near the West Bank city of Hebron in detail. In addition, the conduct of Asraf and Nagauker “misled security forces, the police and the entire public.” During the search, in which a thousand soldiers were scrambled, special units were deployed and aircraft were scrambled, “in some cases stones were hurled at police officers scouring the area in search” of the captive, the prosecutors said.
The defendants’ conduct was “particularly severe,” the indictment charged, “due to their ongoing activity misleading police and security forces and making their jobs harder, and beyond the financial damage harming public security by disrupting the work of police and army forces unnecessarily, at a time of dwindling resources and a lack of personnel, while sowing panic in the hearts of the public.”
According to the account given to Israeli emergency services by Nagauker on the day of the incident, the two men got a flat tire while driving on the road between the settlement of Kiryat Arba and Beit Anun.
Asraf went to get tools to fix the flat from the nearby Arab village and disappeared, Nagauker claimed.
However, Asraf was found safe and sound in a nearby valley late Thursday with a sleeping bag and some canned food. Police quickly concluded the event was a “prank” and a massive “waste of resources.”
Ricky Ben David contributed to this report.
