Four Israeli Arabs were indicted Monday in Nazareth District Court for the murder last month of three Israel Defense Force recruits.
The recruits, two of whom were recent immigrants from the Soviet Union, were hacked to death in their sleep at a basic training camp during the night of Feb. 15-16.
The accused are the brothers Ibrahim and Mohammed Agbariya and a relative, Ihya Agbariya, all from Musheirifa village in the Wadi Ara region of Israel. The fourth is Mohammed Jabarin from the nearby town of Umm el-Fahm.
According to the charge sheet, the four became devout Moslems who believed it was their duty to fight the “infidels,” particularly Jews and Jewish soldiers.
They planned to join the Islamic Jihad, a fundamentalist terrorist group that has training bases in southern Lebanon, but were unable to get across the Israeli border.
The indictment says that before they attacked the recruit training center, a plan to kill a hitchhiking IDF soldier was thwarted, as was the planned murder of an Israeli security guard at Katzir, a Jewish village near Umm el-Fahm.
Their attack on the lightly defended training camp was particularly brutal. The three victims were slashed with knives, axes and a pitchfork.
The assailants got away with stolen IDF weapons with which they had planned to attack a nearby police station, the indictment said.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
