Police have opened a murder investigation into the case of 13-year-old Oren Brahami, whose badly decomposed body was found Tuesday in an abandoned wing of the Armenian Monastery near the Jaffa harbor.
The monastery lies only some 165 yards west of the Jaffa police station.
Brahami was last seen April 24 in Jaffa Port, where he had gone fishing with a friend. Police investigators believe he was murdered on the same night, after which his body was dragged to the monastery and hidden under a pile of rags and metal bars.
The body was found by a group of yeshiva students, who had volunteered in an intensive week-long search for the Bat Yam resident.
The body was identified only after a preliminary autopsy was done at the Abu Kabir Institute for Forensic Medicine. The final identification was accomplished with the help of the boy’s dentist, from X-rays in his clinic.
The body was so decomposed that at first it was believed to be that of a dead soldier, and later that of a young girl.
The unlit park surrounding the monastery is known as a location for lovers’ trysts. About seven months ago, a 16-year-old boy was raped in the monastery. His attackers, residents of the territories, had dragged him to the monastery after first “drinking him under the table.”
Meanwhile, the mother of a 12-year-old girl found murdered seven years ago under similar circumstances expressed her shock after Brahami’s body was found.
“I pity the mother, I know what she’s going through,” Mazal Elimelech, mother of Nava Elimelech, said Sunday.
A memorial service for Nava Elimelech, marking the anniversary of her death, was held last month, but went unmentioned in the press.
Said the mother: “Only the family remembers and hurts. Only after the next incident the press remembers us.”
Also on Tuesday, in another, happier incident, Nir Seid, a 16-year-old Haifa boy who had been missing from his home since Sunday, was found alive and healthy in Eilat.
Said disappeared from his home hours before he was to fly with a youth delegation to Poland, to attend Holocaust memorial services there.
His father, Shlomo Seid, said his son had gone through a personal “breakdown” after reading so much Holocaust literature before the trip.
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