Woman found dead in village near Umm al-Fahm; 5 arrested

Police arrested five people for questioning Saturday night after a woman was found dead in an apartment in the village of Musheirifa in northern Israel, near the city of Umm al-Fahm.

“Officers from the Umm al-Fahm police station and forensic investigators who arrived at the scene began to gather evidence, alongside extensive searches, and managed after a short while to arrest five people suspected of involvement in the incident,” the police said in a statement.

The woman’s body will be transferred to the Abu Kabir forensics institute for an autopsy, police said. The woman was not publicly named.

Mohammad Taysir Karut, a relative of the woman who serves as deputy head of the Ma’ale Iron regional council, which includes Musheirifa, claimed there was no foul play.

“The whole police statement is a lie. A murder did not occur here, at all. She suffered from a severe mental illness and was treated in a mental institution, and only about two months ago she returned home, in order to rest a bit,” he said, according to the Ynet news site.

“This wasn’t a murder, and all of the people they arrested are normal people. The police must release a correction and an apology for hurting all of us and causing harm to our family. The police are behaving irresponsibly, without knowing for sure what the cause of death is.”

According to the Abraham Initiatives organization, 146 members of the Arab community have died in violent circumstances since the beginning of the year, among them 11 women, amid an unrelenting crime wave plaguing Arab locales throughout Israel. The statistic does not include the woman found dead on Saturday.

The vast majority of homicides in the Arab community remain unsolved by law enforcement, with many community leaders criticizing police for focusing on what they say are the wrong things and failing to coordinate with local Arab politicians in the fight against violent crime.