Israelis convicted of burning Palestinian teen alive

Suha and Hussein Abu Khdeir, center, parents of Mohammed Abu Khdeir, hold posters with his portrait after the reading of the verdict in his killing, at the Jerusalem District Court, Monday, Nov. 30, 2015. The court on Monday convicted two Israeli youths in the grisly killing of Abu Khdeir, while delaying a verdict for 31-year-old Yosef Haim Ben David in the case due to a last-minute insanity plea. The judge determined that Ben David, and two Israeli minors had snatched Abu Khdeir from an east Jerusalem sidewalk in July 2014 and burned him alive in a forest outside the city. (AP Photo/Oded Balilty)

Court finds two Israeli minors guilty of burning to death Mohammed Abu Khdeir but delays ruling over the accused ringleader, waiting for the results of a psychiatric evaluation.

According to Alarabiya, the court said that the three of them admitted to kidnapping Mohammed Abu Khdeir, torturing him and burning him alive, in what they described as a revenge for the death of three Israeli men, days before kidnapping Abu Khdeir.

Mohammed Abu Khdeir, 16, was abducted and killed on July 2, 2014, and his body was found in a forest in West Jerusalem. The two Israeli youths were found guilty of murder while their 31-year-old ringleader, Yosef Haim Ben David, has turned in a claim of insanity. The two accomplices, beat the Palestinian teen unconscious in the back of a car being driven by Ben David, according to their court confessions. One of the youths helped douse Mohammad Abu Khdair with petrol while he was still alive, before Ben David lit a match and set him on fire, they added.

The court held off on convicting Ben David after his lawyers submitted a report in recent days arguing his mental state meant he was not responsible for his actions.

Abu Khdeir’s father denounced the delay in the verdict for the man accused of being the ringleader and called for the trio’s houses to be demolished, as Israel does for Palestinian attackers.

“The court behaves one way with Arabs and another way with Jews,” Hussein Abu Khdeir told local reporters outside the court, suspecting the last-minute psychiatric report by Ben David’s lawyers and asking why it was not submitted earlier, “how can the defendant, two days ago, a year-and-a-half after the crime, bring a document claiming insanity?” he told reporters. “It’s all lies and I worry that the court will free them in the end.”

Adnan Al-Husseiny, minister of Jerusalem affairs in the Palestinian government, talked to media after they found the body saying that this cruel murder of the child, burning him alive is cruel, and he remarked how the tension between Israeli and Palestinian would escalate quickly because of that. He said, “It’s my first time to see such cruelty in killing a child. The settlers wanted to make themselves recognizable even in killing.”

As the case unfolded, the three defendants turned on each other with the two minors attempting to place most of the blame on Ben David, who they said had given them pills before the killing.

These incidents were part of a spiral of violence that led to a 50-day war in the Gaza Strip between Israel and Palestinian militants. The war killed more than 2,200 people, making 2014 the bloodiest year of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, according to the United Nations.