Suspected accomplice in deadly Jaffa stabbing spree arrested

A resident of East Jerusalem was reportedly arrested on suspicion of aiding the terrorist who killed an American tourist in Jaffa in March.

Muhammad Awieda, who is in his 30s, is suspected of driving the stabber Bashar Massalha from the West Bank city of Qalqilya to Tel Aviv, the Ynet news website reported on Monday.

He was suspected of manslaughter, conspiring to commit an attack, and illegally transporting a Palestinian into Israel.

The report said Awieda was remanded into custody by an Israeli court on Monday for seven days.

Massalha, a 22-year-old from the Qalqilya area in the West Bank, killed US citizen Taylor Force and injured 10 others in a rampage along the Jaffa boardwalk on March 8. He was killed by security forces during his attack.

A photo posted on Bashar Massalha’s Facebook page on February 26, 2016, shows him ‘in the heart of Mecca’ (Facebook)

Police at the time said the attacker first stabbed three people along the Jaffa boardwalk, a popular site for shopping and leisure, before fleeing inland toward the city’s Kikar Hasha’on, where he stabbed three more people. He then went on to stab at least four people near the Dolphinarium in Tel Aviv.

Vanderbilt University held a campus memorial service for Taylor Force on March 18, 2016. (Facebook)

Force was a US army veteran who had done tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. He graduated from West Point Military Academy in 2009 and served as a field artillery officer from 2009 to 2014 at Fort Hood.

Twenty-nine Israelis and four foreign nationals have been killed in Palestinian terrorism and violence since October 2015. Some 200 Palestinians have been killed, around two-thirds of them while attacking Israelis, and the rest during clashes with troops, according to the Israeli army.