Five Palestinians have been arrested for the brutal murder last month of an Israeli lawyer who was working in the European Community’s aid office in the Gaza Strip.
A sixth man implicated in the killing has escaped across the nearby Egyptian border, the army has reported.
One of the men arrested, Rifat Ali Mohammed Aruki, 23, from the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood of Gaza City, was a guard who worked at a nearby office and knew the victim, Ian Feinberg, personally.
The South African-born Feinberg would travel regularly from his Tel Aviv law firm to the offices of the E.C., one of his clients.
Feinberg and Aruki knew each other, and Feinberg even supplied his eventual killer with free legal advice after Aruki was caught inside Israel without a permit.
Aruki was a guard at the offices of the Cooperation for Development organization, a British-run economic aid office which provided loans for small businessmen.
Aruki was presumably able to supply the other gang members with advance news of Feinberg’s work schedule in Gaza.
It was the arrest last week of Mohammed Sakara, 22, of the Bureij refugee camp in Gaza, that led the army to crack open the case.
It is believed that it was the information he provided which led troops to Feinberg’s killers.
The two men directly responsible for the killing were picked up Wednesday, Aruki and Omar Issa Rajib, 19, of the Shati refugee camp.
Three others were detained for questioning in the case.
In other news related to the territories, Israeli Sgt. Shmuel Tiho, 21, of Beersheba, died Wednesday of stab wounds suffered in the West Bank city of Nablus last week.
Tiho and another soldier were attacked by three Palestinian militants while on guard duty at a rooftop observation post.
The two soldiers were bringing food up to the post when they were attacked on the stair-well.
Tiho was stabbed in the neck but managed to run about 650 feet to the Nablus police station with the knife protruding from his neck.
The other soldier was lightly wounded in the attack.
Doctors at the scene, apparently misjudging the severity of Tiho’s wound, did not order him evacuated by helicopter but sent him instead to the hospital by ambulance.
Tiho fell into a coma shortly after admission.
He was buried in the Beersheba military cemetery Thursday.
Tiho’s family has asked the army for a full account of the investigation into his murder, in an effort to find out the reason for the delay in providing him with medical aid.
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.
