Suicidal Afula bus station ‘attacker’ released to house arrest

A Nazareth woman who was shot when she brandished a knife at a bus station in the city of Afula last month was released to house arrest, a court said Wednesday, after she was found to not have intended to carry out a terror attack.

A police investigation into the October 9 incident revealed that Asra’a Zidan Abed, 30, wanted to be shot and killed by police.

She will not face charges for attempted murder. Instead, she faces minor charges of carrying a dangerous weapon.

Police and Shin Bet investigators say they believe Abed did not plan to stab anyone when she wielded the knife at the Afula station, but was pretending to be a Palestinian terrorist in the hope that she would be shot by security forces.

Earlier in the investigation police said they thought Abed may suffer from mental health issues. Suspicions were confirmed after discovering a history of suicide attempts and hospitalizations, the police said at the time. Investigators think she was trying to commit suicide, having recently lost custody of a child.

During the incident, she was moderately injured after being shot in the leg.

Abed will remain under house arrest pending her trial.

A video of Abed’s tense standoff with police was widely shared last month.

She is shown brandishing the knife, but not attacking, as several armed police officers and soldiers shout at her to put the knife down. After several tense minutes, a police officer arrives at a sprint, sees the woman holding the knife and fires at her lower torso.

A security guard at the terminal initially told police he believed the woman was attacking him when she pulled the knife out of her purse while standing near him.

Police say she bought the knife shortly before boarding a bus in her hometown of Nazareth. Investigators were puzzled at why she boarded a bus with the knife but traveled the entire ride to Afula without carrying out an attack — or why she then brandished it at the Afula terminal around large numbers of police and soldiers.

The incident came at the start of a spate of stabbings by Palestinian assailants in Jerusalem, Afula and elsewhere that have set the country on edge over the past month.

Some two dozen suspected Palestinian attackers have been shot and killed during the month-long wave of violence and several more have been shot and injured in the course of attacks, according to police.

Palestinian officials have accused Israeli soldiers of being light on the trigger finger and “executing” attackers who could be subdued in other ways.