Danino apologizes to Beduins for police failure

Police chief apologizes for failure to respond to complaint that may have helped prevent murder of two Beduin girls in Al-Furra.

By BEN HARTMAN
Yochanan Danino 370 (photo credit: Marc Israel Sellem/The Jerusalem Post)
Yochanan Danino 370
(photo credit: Marc Israel Sellem/The Jerusalem Post)
Insp.-Gen. Yohanan Danino apologized to the Beduin community on Wednesday for police failure to respond to a complaint that may have helped prevent the murder of two Beduin girls in the village of al-Fura.
The apology came at a meeting between Danino and heads of the Beduin community at the Negev subdistrict headquarters in Beersheba.
During the meeting, which was closed to the press, Danino reportedly vowed to continue efforts to improve police services in the Beduin sector.
The mother of the girls, aged three and five, had gone to the police in Arad and said she believed that her ex-husband would harm the girls, but there was no follow up on the complaint and the girls were found murdered the next day.
The mother is a resident of the West Bank and had also issued six complaints against the father to the Ma’aleh Adumim police station.
Danino launched a committee to probe officers’ conduct in the case and on May 23, found “severe failures in the performance of all levels among the officers of the Arad station in every aspect of their handling of the mother’s complaint.”
Danino then ordered the indefinite dismissal of the chief of the Arad station, Cmdr. Yoni Zeituk, Dep.- Cmdr. Albert Cohen and the head of the station’s investigations branch, Insp. Roni Eitan.
Attorney Shahadeh Ibn Biri, who is representing the girl’s mother Abir Amtirat in a lawsuit against the state, presented to the Tel Aviv District Court this week and said that apologies and dismissals aren’t enough.
“The problem isn’t that we need apologies and steps after an event like this happens, they must work to prevent future situations like this from happening,” Ibn Biri said, adding that the mother was made to feel like a criminal every time she had to cross over the Green Line to issue a police complaint against the father.