Eritrean mistaken for gunman killed
Print Edition
AN Eritrean migrant, shot by a security guard and kicked by an angry Israeli crowd that mistook him for a gunman, was identified yesterday as one of the dead from an attack on a bus station in the southern city of Beersheba.
The Eritrean agricultural worker was named by his employer as Mila Abtum. In what some Israeli media described as a lynching, captured on amateur video on Sunday, the attack on Abtum underscored a mounting sense of panic and anger over a wave of Palestinian attacks that shows no sign of abating.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose government has deployed soldiers to reinforce municipal police and encouraged Israeli civilians with gun licenses to go about armed, warned against vigilantism.
“We’ve a country of law. No one will take the law into his own hands,” he told his party’s lawmakers. The almost three weeks of violence has killed 41 Palestinians, including assailants and demonstrators at anti-Israeli protests, eight Israelis and now one Eritrean. It was set off in part by Palestinians’ anger over what they see as increased Jewish encroachment on Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque complex.
US Secretary of State John Kerry, due to hold meetings this week with Israeli and Palestinian leaders, said yesterday it was vital they clarify the status around the compound, also revered by Jews as the location of two destroyed biblical temples.
Netanyahu has said he seeks no change to the decades-old status quo in which Israel bans Jewish prayer at the al-Aqsa site in the walled Old City of East Jerusalem, captured along with the West Bank in a 1967 war. He says religious incitement, speeded by social media, has fueled the bloodshed.
In the most recent incident, an attacker who police said was a Bedouin citizen of Israel entered the heavily guarded station armed with a pistol on Sunday and shot dead a soldier before snatching his rifle and opening fire on the crowd, wounding nine people.
Police shot the assailant dead, and initially reported there had been a second gunman. On Monday, they said there had been no other attacker and an investigation had been opened into the Eritrean man’s death.
Amateur video showed a security guard shooting the Eritrean. Lying on the ground bleeding, and with armed police surrounding him in an apparent effort to protect him, he was kicked in the head several times by people who slipped through the cordon.
- About Us
- |
- Terms of Use
- |
-
RSS - |
- Privacy Policy
- |
- Contact Us
- |
- Shanghai Call Center: 962288
- |
- Tip-off hotline: 52920043
- 沪ICP证：沪ICP备05050403号-1
- |
- 互联网新闻信息服务许可证：31120180004
- |
- 网络视听许可证：0909346
- |
- 广播电视节目制作许可证：沪字第354号
- |
- 增值电信业务经营许可证：沪B2-20120012
Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.
