Police arrest 7 for TA beating of Arab resident

Police on Monday morning arrested seven Tiberias youths accused of beating a Jaffa man on the Tel Aviv promenade last Sunday night.

The youths, who include five minors, were arrested after Tel Aviv Center subdistrict police launched a special investigation into the incident, which made headlines as another suspected racially motivated attack on an Arab Israeli.

Police said they are still questioning the youths and trying to determine the motive behind the attack, and if it was in fact racially motivated.

The suspects were brought to the Tel Aviv Magistrate’s Court on Monday afternoon, where the two adults had their remands extended until Wednesday.

The five minors will remain in custody until Tuesday morning.

The two adults seemed relaxed and in high spirits at the hearing on Monday, both with almost the same identical outfit and haircut. One of the two checked his bleached blonde hair in the reflection of the docket glass, while the other flirted with his girlfriend, an Ethiopian-Israeli soldier sitting on a bench a few meters away.

The suspects’ attorneys badgered police for evidence of their involvement in the attack, asking if there were fingerprints or video footage of the attack, both of which police refused to answer.

They also repeatedly asked a detective about a tattoo of a Star of David or some other Israeli or Jewish symbol that the victim reported one of his attackers showing them. The lawyers told The Jerusalem Post that none of the suspects have such a tattoo.

The attorneys also said that on the night of the attack, the two suspects were robbed by a few Sudanese men who worked with the victim as municipality street cleaners, and that the suspects chased them down, which is when the brawl with the victim began. One of the lawyers also stated that the victim, 40- year-old Hassan Ausruf, has a long criminal record of property and drug crimes, and cannot be trusted as the only eyewitness to the alleged hate crime.

Ausruf told police last week that he was working on the promenade near the Dolphinarium when he was surrounded and beaten by a group of over a dozen youths who called him a “dirty Arab,” and hit him over the head with a bottle and a garbage can. He said one of them told him, “You Arabs are trying to take over our country,” before he lost consciousness.

Ausruf was taken to Ichilov Hospital at the Sourasky Medical Center in Tel Aviv, suffering from contusions and lacerations to his head, as well as a fracture to his left eye socket.

Ausruf remained at the hospital on Monday, where his wife Neriman said he was undergoing surgery to repair the fracture in the eye socket and getting pins placed in his jaw.

Neriman said she and her children saw news of the arrests on Monday and were pleased to see that police had managed to arrest some of the men possible.

She reacted with anger, however, when asked about claims made by one of the suspect’s attorneys about her husband, saying that he “has been rehabilitated.

He hasn’t been involved in any of that stuff for a long time. He doesn’t have these problems anymore, he gets up every morning at 4 a.m. to work to feed his family, he doesn’t deserve this.”