Police are searching for the killer of a young British woman kibbutz volunteer whose semi-nude body was found Wednesday in a eucalyptus grove 200 meters from a road junction in the northern Negev. Police said she was strangled and raped.
The victim was identified as Lucy Amos, 23, of Kingston-On-Thames, near London, who has been in Israel since April 1985 and was working as a volunteer at Moshav Ein Yahav in the southern Negev. She was reported missing on Monday by a male friend, Yehuda Cohen of Kibbutz Dorot in the northern Negev when she failed to arrive as planned to spend Independence Day with him.
He alerted kibbutz members, who discovered the body near the junction of the main Negev highway and the five-kilometer dirt track leading to the kibbutz. Police assume she alighted from a bus at the junction and was walking to the kibbutz when assaulted.
Amos was the second foreign volunteer and the fourth young woman murdered in the northern Negev in recent months. On March 27, a 20-year-old West German woman, Miriam Stucker, died at a Beersheba hospital two weeks after she was found comatose with a bullet wound in her head, in a field near Kibbutz Revivim. She too had been a volunteer and was on her way to meet a male friend.
But police said there appeared to be no connection with the rape-murder of Amos and the other killings because the earlier victims were shot and were not sexually molested. They said they have not ruled out a criminal rather than terrorist motive for the latest murder.
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