Less than a month after a Nazareth teen was attacked with acid in her home, the
district attorney for the northern region indicted two male relatives of the
girl.
The attack left the victim seriously wounded and blind in one eye,
with doctors battling to save her vision in the other.
The defendants,
both of whom live next door to the girl, will face charges of sexual assault for
abuses police say they carried out against the victim over a period of time
before the assault. The older suspect, aged 51, was also charged with aggravated
assault for throwing the acid in the girl’s face.
Police and the
prosecutor’s office charge that the girl was attacked after the 51- year-old man
found out that she was getting engaged to another man, which he feared “would
cause her to become distant from him and he would be unable to have his way with
her anymore,” according to the indictment.
The document states that on
February 18 at 11:30 p.m., the man knocked on the girl’s window and when she
opened it, he threw hydrochloric acid in her face and fled the
scene.
According to the indictment, the man’s crimes “show great cruelty,
to the extent to where he would stop at nothing in order to have his way with
her, and show that he has no respect for human life.”
Attorney Said Hadad
told The Jerusalem Post on Sunday that his client, the 51- year-old man, has
denied all the charges against him and was not at all connected to the
incident.
Hadad added that his client was at home at the time of the
attack and that there are witnesses who have attested to this fact.
When
asked why police singled him out, he said his client had told him that he had
been set up.
At Rambam Hospital last month, the victim’s mother said that
her daughter had been harassed by the man for a long time, and that in recent
months the harassment had gotten worse, and included threats to harm her
physically.
She also said that her daughter had become engaged to a
student living in Jordan shortly before the attack.
A gag order remains
on the case banning publication of the names of the defendants or the victim and
her family.