Dei'ah veDibur - Information & Insight
  

A Window into the Charedi World

2 Tammuz 5759 - June 16, 1999 | Mordecai Plaut, director Published Weekly
NEWS

OPINION
& COMMENT

HOME
& FAMILY

IN-DEPTH
FEATURES

VAAD HORABBONIM HAOLAMI LEINYONEI GIYUR

TOPICS IN THE NEWS

HOMEPAGE

 

Sponsored by
Shema Yisrael Torah Network
Shema Yisrael Torah Network

Produced and housed by
Jencom

News
The Murderers of David Catorza Hy'd Sentenced to Life-in- Prison

by Betzalel Kahn and Itim

The Regional Court of Jerusalem has sentenced the three murderers of the avreich R' Dovid Catorza Hy'd to life- in-prison, after they were be convicted by their own admission as part of a plea-bargaining deal. As part of the deal, the commander of the Hamas unit which murdered Catorza was sentenced to eighteen years in prison after he was convicted only of abetting the murder.

The members of the Hamas unit also planned to explode a booby- trapped car on Straus Street in the heart of Jerusalem. One of the members of the unit, Shu'ayiv Abu Sanina agreed to explode the car. However the plan didn't materialize after Mochi A-din A-Sharif, one of the heads of the military arm of the Hamas organization, was killed while preparing the booby- trapped car in Ramallah. They also had plans to kidnap a soldier as a hostage.

R' Dovid Catorza, who immigrated to Israel from France in 1995, was stabbed to death early in the morning of Tu BeShevat, 5758 (February 11, 1998), on his way to shul early in the morning kevosikin in Jerusalem's Ramat Shlomo neighborhood.

The state prosecutor and the lawyers for the defendants, Jawad Boulos and Lea Tsemel, had agreed to a plea arrangement which included a revised indictment and agreement on the sentence both sides would request of the court. The judges accepted the arrangement.

However, they wrote that Abasi deserved a stiffer sentence. "The accused was the living spirit behind this organization which led to murder," they wrote. "He planned the car bomb. He was the head of the gang, he established it, he enlisted its members, he guided it, he assigned it its missions, he commanded it and he supplied it with money and arms."

After the gang decided to kill a Jew, they purchased two knives and drove around Jewish neighborhoods looking for a victim, the judges wrote.

In the early morning of February 11, 1998, they drove to Ramat Shlomo, "where they spotted David Catorza, who was on his way to shul. Accused numbers two and three got out of the car, each with a knife in his hand. They approached Catorza, who had his back to them, and stabbed him . . . until they were sure he was dead."

A maggid shiur who arrived in the neighborhood at 6:25 a.m. to give his daily shiur noticed a suspicious car and called the police. They immediately dispatched a patrol car which arrived in the area at 6:36. They were driving around trying to find the suspicious car when they were summoned to the scene of the murder.

It was only about a year ago, some four months after the murder, that R' Catorza was recognized as a victim of hostile terror. The police at first refused to certify that this was the case, since they had no information whatsoever, and it was only the efforts of MK Rabbi Moshe Gafni, who involved then-Prime Minister Netanyahu, that won the family this recognition and all the rights and benefits that go with it.


All material on this site is copyrighted and its use is restricted.
Click here for conditions of use.