Police arrested three Eritrean migrants for allegedly raping a 15-year-old girl
and assaulting her boyfriend near the Tel Aviv Central Bus Station late last
month, authorities revealed on Thursday after a media ban was lifted.
The
announcement came after another alleged sexual assault and rape of a young woman
by African migrants in south Tel Aviv, and is likely to further escalate
tensions in the area.
According to police, the couple had left a
nightclub on Shivat Zion Street on the night of Independence Day when they were
set upon by three men.
The men dragged them behind a building and two
proceeded to rape the girl, while her boyfriend, also a minor, was held down.
The suspects also stole cash and a gold necklace before fleeing. They did not
use weapons.
The male victim was not seriously injured.
Detectives
from the Yiftah police sub-district in Tel Aviv questioned dozens of migrants who
eventually led them to the three suspects. The first suspect, aged 24, was
arrested on May 2 and the other two suspects, aged 18, were arrested in the past
week. The two 18 year olds denied the accusations against them.
Police
said that the Eritreans had entered Israel illegally from Egypt one to two years
ago.
Two of the migrants are suspected of raping the girl and all three
are suspected of assault and robbery.
Earlier this week, police said that
officers on a routine foot patrol found a 19-year-old woman encircled by African
migrants who had allegedly sexually assaulted and robbed her.
“We believe
she had been raped by one of the suspects as well,” the Tel Aviv Police
spokeswoman added.
The officers spotted Eritrean and Sudanese men
surrounding the Bat Yam woman in a parking lot on Sharon Street in south Tel
Aviv. She had been on her way home from a nightclub. Approaching the group,
police saw that the men were sexually assaulting her, the spokeswoman
said.
Police arrested four suspects, while two others managed to
flee.
Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch (Yisrael Beytenu)
toured south Tel Aviv on Wednesday, criticizing Interior Minister Eli Yishai
(Shas) for the failure of the Interior Ministry’s Oz immigration unit to begin
delivering illegal migrants to a prison facility built for that purpose.
“They asked us to
create prison places. We prepared 2,000 places, but we have not been brought
even a single prisoner,” he said.
Anywhere between 300 and 500 illegal
African migrants have been entering the country every week from Egypt,
Aharonovitch added.
He proposed focusing on stopping the flow of
infiltrators, and giving those in Israel the incentive of leaving by providing
each with NIS 1,000 and a plane ticket out of the country.