Two men indicted for south Tel Aviv terror attack

Charges against Mohammed Bin Said Zofran from Qalqilya, 21, the main defendant in attack that injured 8, include attempted murder, robbery.

By JOANNA PARASZCZUK
Tel Aviv terror attack 311 (photo credit: REUTERS/ Nir Elias)
Tel Aviv terror attack 311
(photo credit: REUTERS/ Nir Elias)
Indictments were filed on Sunday in the Tel Aviv District Court against two men in connection with a terror attack in south Tel Aviv in August.
Eight people were injured in the attack, in which 21-year-old Mohammed Bin Said Zofran carjacked a taxi at knife-point and rammed it into border- police officers Or Hakim and Albert Sabah and a civilian bystander, Itay Weinberg, before stabbing several others.
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Zofran shouted “Allahu Akbar” [God is great] as he swerved into border police outside the crowded Haoman 17 nightclub on Salameh Street.
He went on to brutally stab a nightclub security guard before being subdued by nightclub manager Yitzhak Assaraf and two more guards, Oleg Chritov and Grigory Sokolov. The three men were injured in the struggle.
Zofran, originally from Kalkilya, is charged with attempted murder, injury with serious intent, robbery, illegal residency and conspiracy to commit a crime.
A second defendant, 21- year-old south Tel Aviv resident Mohammed Bin Saddam Hussein Biari, is charged with conspiracy to commit a crime, failure to prevent a crime and destroying evidence.
According to the indictment, in 2011 the Kalkilya native was living in Israel illegally, making a living by doing odd jobs and sleeping in an abandoned apartment next to the Siksik mosque in Jaffa.
While praying at the mosque Zofran met Biari, an Arab-Israeli from Jaffa. The two then began to plan a terror attack.
By July 2011, Zofran had already begun physical training for the terror attack. He practiced how to use a knife and a stick in his apartment.
On August 12, during Ramadan, Zofran and Biari hatched a plot to stab Israeli security forces and civilian Jewish Israelis near the al- Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.
They bought two knives and traveled by bus to the capital.
Zofran and Biari stayed at the al-Aqsa mosque for two weeks. After speaking to a cleric at the mosque, however, Zofran told his friend that he had decided to act alone and would return to Jaffa to become a “martyr.” Before he left, however, Zofran used Biari’s cellphone to record a short film of himself for his parents.
On August 28, Zofran went to the new Central Bus Station in Tel Aviv, planning to stab a soldier, steal his gun and shoot border police. When he failed to find a suitable victim, he noticed a tractor on a building site on Yedidia Frenkel Street in the Florentin neighborhood.
Zofran decided to steal the tractor and use it to run over soldiers.
That night, Zofran returned to the construction site but could not find the tractor.
Instead, he decided to hijack a taxi and use it to attack border police standing at the nearby junction between Abarbanel and Salameh streets.
Biari was arrested shortly afterwards, after he had deleted Zofran’s movie from his cellphone.