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Sunday 07 Feb 2016 - 16:46 Makkah mean time-28-4-1437
Mohammed Abu Khudair Photo: Reuters
Jerusalem, (IINA) - The Jerusalem District Court has sentenced a young Israeli to life and another to 21 years in prison for burning alive a Palestinian teenager, The Telegraph reported.
The two Israelis were minors at the time of the July 2014 attack, in which they and a third man snatched Mohammed Abu Khdeir, 16 year-old, from an East Jerusalem street and subsequently killed him.
Israeli settler Yosef Haim Ben-David, 31 year-old, is said to have led the attack on Abu Khdeir, but his lawyers say he suffers from a mental illness and was not responsible for his actions at the time.
The court has found that he committed the crime, but is yet to rule if he is mentally competent.
The two others were 16 when they were charged in 2014 but are now adults. They have not been identified because they were minors.
Life sentences were the maximum available punishment at the court.
Mohammed was snatched from an East Jerusalem street on the early hours of July 2 last year and taken to a forest where he was beaten, doused in petrol and set on fire.
Ben-David told police interrogators that the killing was in revenge for the murders of three Jewish teenagers, who were kidnapped by Hamas members several weeks earlier.
He and his two accomplices changed out of their Jewish religious garbs into secular clothes and asked Mohammed for directions before gagging him and bundling him into the car.
The younger men claimed that Ben-David plied them with pills and energy drinks to psyche them up for the killing.
A study last year by Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights group, found that 85 percent of investigations into crimes allegedly committed by Israelis against Palestinians in the West Bank are closed without any prosecution.
Of the small minority of cases that are prosecuted, only one-third end in a conviction.
The Palestinian teenager, the fifth of seven children, has become a symbol for Palestinians in East Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank.
His photograph appears on posters his family home in the Shuafat neighborhood of East Jerusalem is full of plaques presented to his parents by different Palestinian groups.
The family said they hoped convictions against all three Israeli men would deter future violence against Palestinians. One year after Mohammed’s death, a Palestinian toddler named Ali Dawabsha and his parents were killed in a firebombing attack by Jewish extremists in the West Bank.
“If the court had quickly convicted Mohammed’s killers, the killing of the Dawabshas could have been prevented,” Abu Khdeir.
SM/IINA
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