Suspect in Afula woman’s killing retracts confession
Attorneys for Yousef Hussein Halifa claim police spat at him, forced him to admit to murder of Shelley Dadon
A taxi driver accused of murdering 20-year-old Afula resident Shelley Dadon in a high-profile case was brought to trial Sunday at the Nazareth District Court, where the suspect’s attorneys claimed that police investigators had unlawfully and forcibly extracted from the driver a confession to the killing.
In July, the state’s attorney filed charges against Yousef Hussein Halifa, 36, after he admitted to driving Dadon on May 1 to the Migdal Haemek industrial center, where she was headed for a job interview, and later stabbing her to death.
“They [police] tied [Halifa] to a chair, spat on him, and he broke down and confessed to a murder he did not commit,” the suspect’s attorneys claimed during the trail, according to Ynet.
“Also, during the week [in police captivity] he slept for a total of eight hours.”
Halifa’s attorneys further claimed that the suspect had driven workers on the day of Dadon’s murder, adding that since he was arrested two weeks later, he could not properly recall any exact details.
Dadon’s murder trial is set to resume next week, and both the defense and the prosecution are set to present evidence on the case.
Police have asked the court to keep Halifa in detention for the duration of the trial on the grounds that previous attempts to cover up the crime were a reasonable cause for concern that he would further attempt to obstruct the proceedings if released.
The motive for Dadon’s murder has yet to be determined, but police and the Shin Bet security service assess that the alleged killing was likely nationalistically motivated. However, in excerpts of the indictment published by Israeli news site NRG, there was no mention of motive. Dadon’s parents insisted on June 30 that the attack was nationalistically motivated, and called on the police to publicly declare it as such.
According to Halifa’s initial account, after disposing of Dadon’s body in a parking lot, he threw out the young woman’s cellphone as well as the weapon he had used to commit the murder and cleaned the bloodstains from his car. After escaping the scene of the crime, Hussein allegedly disposed of her wallet near Beit Zarzir.
Excerpts from the indictment state that Dadon realized after she got in the cab with Halifa that something was wrong and called her cousin to tell her that she was afraid. It was apparently after this call that Halifa pulled over into a parking lot, took out a knife and stabbed her repeatedly. Dadon’s attempts to defend herself and escape were unsuccessful.
Halifa stabbed Dadon 17 times, the Ynet news site reported.
In mid-June, a gag order on the murder investigation was partially lifted, revealing that six Israeli Arab suspects — several of them minors — were arrested in connection with the case and later released. While the interrogations yielded no developments, the investigation then found a separate lead, but information about it was subject to a court-imposed gag order.
In May, Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch said Dadon’s murder may have been criminally motivated and not a terror attack as previously suspected. Aharonovitch said that it was not clear if Dadon had been killed in an act of terror because she was a Jew. He added that the investigation was still ongoing.
The murder ignited passions in Afula, where a protest calling to stiffen penalties against murderers drew over 2,000 people.
Marissa Newman and Adiv Sterman contributed to this report.
