Border cop gets 16 years for rape

Gindowi, 23, assaulted 70-yr-old woman an hour after committing a hit-and-run.

By REBECCA ANNA STOIL, JPOST.COM STAFF
The Haifa District Court sentenced Ahmad Hindawi, a 23-year-old border policeman, to 16 and a half years in jail for raping and sodomizing a 70-year-old Holocaust survivor. The court also convicted Hindawi, a resident of the Beduin village of Bir al-Maksur, of making threats and intent to cause harm, due to his involvement in a hit-and-run accident that occurred an hour before the rape. According to the report, the car that he hit chased after him, and, after catching up to Hindawi, demanded that he give them his details. After showing them his Border Police identification, one of the passengers of the other car started calling the police. When Hindawi saw this, he fired two shots in the air. Following the hit-and-run, Hindawi continued to drive around the Haifa Bay area for an hour until he saw the elderly woman walking along the side of the road. Hindawi then jumped out of the car, threw the woman to the ground, dragged her behind some bushes, raped her, sodomized her and then left her "wounded and battered all over her body," according to the conviction. Arrested shortly after the incident, Hindawi was investigated first by the Justice Department's Police Investigative Department, which recommended criminal proceedings against him. As soon as the case reached court, Hindawi pled guilty to the charges against him. The judges presiding over the case wrote in their verdict that the acts committed by Hindawi were of the gravest kind of sexual assault. "The convict attacked a woman who was innocently walking along the side of a road and violently wounded her in a way which crushed her self-confidence, her self-respect and her health," the ruling read. "He found himself a weak victim, a 70-year-old woman, who didn't have the strength to resist him."