Negev crime family captains may agree to guilty plea to avoid murder charge.
By REBECCA ANNA STOIL
Negev crime family, the Perinian brothers, are in negotiations with district attorneys to strike a plea bargain following a murder charge, a Channel 10 news report revealed Wednesday evening.
Sharon and Oded Perinian, suspected of involvement in several murders and operation of an illegal business near Ashkelon, may have the charges against them reduced from murder to conspiracy to commit a crime, and are requesting each brother serve five years in prison. But the district attorney's office is insisting on at least 20 years.
The brothers were arrested in August 2005, after police searched for them for over a month. The arrest warrant against them followed years of investigation into the murder of Negev crime boss Pinhas Buhbout. That murder - and the subsequent murder of would-be-state's-witness Tzahi Ben-Or - are also the subject of the Zeiler Commission's probe into the behavior of the Israel Police.
The Perinians allegedly paid off police officers in order to stall the investigations into Ben-Or's and Buhbout's murders. Whether because of kick-backs or because of investigative errors, the probe into the two murders was dragged on by the Southern District's Central Investigative Unit for over five years. After remaining unsolved until 2004, the case was transferred out of the Southern District and cracked in less than a year.
The same Channel 10 report also claimed that Gadi Hazan and Eran Hiya, the two young gangsters who allegedly carried out the murder of Ben-Or in a Cancun, Mexico apartment, were also in negotiation with the district attorney to hammer out a plea bargain. Both Hazan and Hiya, who was a friend of Ben-Or's before the former cop's murder, may strike a deal that would include charges for less serious offenses than the murder charges they currently face.