'Work accident' takes life of Ashkelon criminal

Police say explosion on Monday night was not an assassination attempt, local sources identify the man as Tzion Yana.

Police generic in english crime scene 370 (photo credit: REUTERS/Navesh Chitrakar)
Police generic in english crime scene 370
(photo credit: REUTERS/Navesh Chitrakar)
An explosion that shook an Ashkelon neighborhood last night was caused by a “work accident” linked to a local criminal, Lachish subdistrict police said Tuesday.
They added that the death was not the result of an attempted assassination of the victim, who was pronounced dead at the scene around 1 a.m. Tuesday morning.
The blast was initially thought to be a rocket strike – not uncommon in the city which lies only a few kilometers from the Gaza Strip.
Though police wouldn’t confirm the identity of the victim, sources in Ashkelon named him as Tzion Yana, a local known to police, but not considered a major target of their investigations in the Lachish subdistrict.
It is unclear if he is the same Tzion Yana who in 2009 was arrested for planting an explosives device outside a business in Kiryat Gat as part of a feud between two rival tombstone manufacturers in the Negev city.
Police, however, specified that neither the victim nor the incident are related to the ongoing crime war in the south – which saw the Magidish crime family associates try to acquire a LAW missile earlier this month to use in an attempt on southern kingpin Shalom Domrani.