Teen to be charged for J'lem stabbing

15-year-old Palestinian teen stabbed 28-year-old woman in face on Wednesday.

By ETGAR LEFKOVITS
knife 88 (photo credit: )
knife 88
(photo credit: )
A 15-year-old Palestinian teen who stabbed an Israeli woman in the face in a central Jerusalem park on Wednesday night will likely be charged with attempted murder, police said Thursday. The assailant, who cannot be named because he is a minor, was remanded in custody for seven days Thursday at the Jerusalem Magistrate's Court. He is expected to be indicted during this period. According to police, the suspect, a resident of the West Bank city of Ramallah, told police investigators that he carried out the attack since he wanted to be arrested following a dispute he had with his Palestinian employer earlier in the day. The assailant fled the scene immediately after the 7 p.m. attack on the edge of the city's Liberty Bell Park, but was arrested minutes later near the Jaffa Gate, a five-minute walk from the park, his clothes drenched in blood, Jerusalem police spokesman Shmuel Ben-Ruby said. The knife used in the attack was also found nearby. During his initial police interrogation, he told investigators that he carried out the attack after getting into a dispute with his Palestinian employer, a chicken butcher, earlier in the day, the police said. The teenage assailant said that he had stabbed his Palestinian employer in the face on Wednesday morning since the latter had not paid him his wages. Police on Thursday discounted the teen's claim that he had not meant to kill but simply to wound, noting that such an attack could easily have resulted in death. The suspect's public-appointed attorney, Andrei Rosenthal, did not return calls for comment Thursday. The 28-year-old Jewish victim, who was lightly wounded in the attack, was evacuated to Jerusalem's Hadassah University Hospital at Ein Kerem. The attack was the second stabbing in Jerusalem in the last three months. In August, a 21-year-old British yeshiva student, Shmuel Mett, was stabbed to death by a knife-wielding Palestinian man in the Old City of Jerusalem. A classmate was seriously wounded in that nighttime attack. The suspect in the murder was arrested in the West Bank city of Hebron last month.