Police to probe officers' conduct in Beduin murder

Officers from Arad police station reportedly received complaint from mother of two girls 24 hours before they were murdered.

By BEN HARTMAN
Northen Negev 311 (photo credit: SPNI Open Landscape Institute)
Northen Negev 311
(photo credit: SPNI Open Landscape Institute)
Police Insp.-Gen. Yohanan Danino on Wednesday ordered the Israel Police headquarters to open an investigation against officers from the Arad police station.
He ordered the probe after it emerged that officers had received a complaint from the mother of two young Beduin girls 24 hours before they were found murdered in the village of al-Fura.
The woman told officers that she feared that the girls’ father – from whom she was separated – had threatened to harm the girls and her, but that officers did not pay a visit to the father’s house, where the two girls lived, or follow up on the complaint.
The bodies of the girls, aged three and five, were found in a house in the village showing signs of violence, including strangulation, on Tuesday night.
By Wednesday morning, police had arrested four members of the family – including the mother, who was found in the Jerusalem area and brought in to give testimony before she was released. The father has still not been found and a large-scale operation is under way to locate him.
The investigation is being handled by the Negev branch of the YAMAR special investigative unit.
The others arrested in the case are the father’s first wife, whose remand was extended by three days, and two of her sons, aged 15 and 17.
On May 8, Tel Aviv police received a report of screams coming from an apartment in Tel Aviv’s Hatikva neighborhood.
An officer came, looked in a window and left without speaking to resident Freddy Vinokorsky, 64. Two hours later, Vinokorsky called police to tell them he had just stabbed his wife, Yulia, to death.
While a forensic report determined that the killing took place before the initial police visit, Tel Aviv police ruled that the officer did not conduct himself as he should have, as he failed to make contact with the couple.