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Palestinian Teenager Was Burned Alive, Official Says Autopsy Suggests Palestinian Teenager Was Burned to Death After Abduction
(about 5 hours later)
JERUSALEM — An autopsy of the Palestinian teenager who was snatched from an East Jerusalem street and slain on Wednesday found soot in his lungs that suggests he was burned alive, according to a senior Palestinian official briefed on the preliminary results. JERUSALEM — Muhammad Abu Khdeir, 16, spent his last hours before being abducted, beaten and most likely burned to death in one of his favorite places, doing some of his favorite things.
The autopsy showed that the teenager, Muhammad Hussein Abu Khdeir, 16, who was buried as a martyr on Friday in a funeral that drew thousands, had a head injury and burns over 90 percent of his body, the Palestinian attorney general, Mohammed al-A’wewy, wrote on his agency’s official website. Until about 1 a.m. Wednesday, a close cousin said, Muhammad was at the recreation center named for his respected, expansive Palestinian family in the ancient section of the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Shuafat, impressing friends with his defensive prowess at the foosball table and watching World Cup matches on a flat-screen television he recently helped install.
The Israeli police are still investigating the attack and have not named any suspects in what is widely seen as an act of revenge by Jews for the abduction and murder last month of three Israeli teenagers in the occupied West Bank. “He came in with a Coke, he’s got to carry a bottle of Coca-Cola all the time,” said the cousin, Mohsen Abu Khdeir, a 40-year-old chiropractor who runs the center, called a “hoash” in Arabic. “He was a comedian kind of guy, always joking. He’s the dynamo. He’s the motor of the hoash.”
“It was obvious through autopsy that there was black smoke on the breathing airways, windpipes and in the two lungs,” the attorney general’s website said. “This is proof of inhalation of this material during the torch, while he was alive.” It was only three hours after Dr. Abu Khdeir dropped off Muhammad at home that he saw a Facebook post saying that the boy had been snatched from the street in what is widely suspected to have been an act of revenge by Jews for last month’s kidnapping-killing of three Israeli teenagers. On Saturday, the Palestinian attorney general said that an autopsy had found soot in Muhammad’s lungs, suggesting that he had been burned alive before his charred body was found in a forest.
The autopsy was conducted by Israeli doctors and attended by the Palestinian coroner, none of whom could immediately be reached on Saturday. The preliminary autopsy findings, and reports that a 15-year-old, American-born cousin of Muhammad had been brutally beaten and then arrested by Israeli police officers during a violent clash in the neighborhood on Thursday, only increased the outrage Saturday in Shuafat and among Palestinians elsewhere.
Micky Rosenfeld, a spokesman for the Israeli police, said that there had been no breakthroughs as investigators continued to consider both revenge and other possible criminal motives, and that legal restrictions prevented him from discussing details of what they had found so far. Protests erupted in the evening in Nazareth and a village in Wadi Ara, two Arab areas in northern Israel, after confrontations on Friday in the north and in Jerusalem that led to dozens of injuries and 33 arrests.
“We’re trying to understand and get to exactly what took place and what was the background,” Mr. Rosenfeld said. “It’s critical, as far as the Israeli police are concerned, it’s critical for us to determine what the motive was.” At the same time, militants in the Gaza Strip fired a steady stream of rockets toward Israel all day, one of which was intercepted by Israel’s missile-defense system as it headed toward Beersheba, the first to reach that large southern city since eight days of cross-border battles in 2012.
Muhammad’s relatives and Palestinian leaders have criticized the police and the Israeli news media for suggesting that the grisly death might have been an honor killing or the result of a family dispute. Israeli airstrikes hit three sites the military said belonged to Hamas, the Islamist faction that dominates Gaza and that Israel blames for the June 12 attack on the three teenagers who studied at yeshivas in the occupied West Bank. Another Israeli strike later wounded a 31-year-old man in southern Gaza who the military said had fired one of the rockets.
Muhammad was sitting on a wall outside a mosque and his home in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Shuafat at 3:45 a.m. Wednesday, waiting for the dawn prayer, when a gray Hyundai pulled up and two people forced him into the car, according to video footage that news outlets obtained from security cameras. His charred body was found in the Jerusalem Forest about 90 minutes later. Hamas officials said Friday that talks were underway to restore the 2012 cease-fire after Israel began massing troops around Gaza the day before, but Saturday’s exchanges — continuing a near-daily pattern of the past three weeks — indicated otherwise. Leaders on both sides have said they do not want an escalation.
Human rights groups have also lashed out at the police for what they said was a brutal beating by undercover officers of Tariq Khdeir, 15, an American-born cousin of Muhammad who is spending his summer vacation in Jerusalem. They circulated a video of the beating and pictures of Tariq’s bruised and swollen face, and complained that he was being detained without charge. As interactions between Israelis and Palestinians deteriorated both on the ground and on social media sites, where a new anti-Arab Facebook page quickly garnered 12,000 “likes,” religious and political delegations flocked to the mourning tent outside Muhammad’s house in Shuafat.
“The continued state-sanctioned violence against children is unlawful and unacceptable,” Addameer, a Palestinian group that supports prisoners in Israeli jails, said in a news release. The first Abu Khdeir, named Hassan, started farming here 250 years ago. His descendants are now one of five main families in their well-to-do community, owning perhaps a third of the land and a dozen of the stores on its main street: Red and White Cosmetics, several groceries and the appliance shop run by Muhammad’s father. Now, said the dean of the family, a 71-year-old retired school principal named Ishak, there are some 5,000 Abu Khdeirs, a third of them in Shuafat.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, noting that Tariq is a high school student in Tampa, Fla., called on the State Department to intervene and secure his release. An American consular officer was scheduled to meet the teenager on Saturday afternoon, ahead of a court hearing scheduled for Sunday. They are religious and secular, members of the Fatah faction and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, with many doctors and engineers, and a young generation that shuttles between Jerusalem and the family’s outposts in the United States.
Michael Ratney, the American consul general in Jerusalem, said he could not discuss the case because he had not yet obtained a privacy waiver from Tariq. “If you say you’re from Shuafat, they know you’re Abu Khdeir,” said Mison Abu Khdeir, 26, an architect who was born in Chicago and moved here in 2000. “Our family is so big it gives kind of a sense of safety. Wherever you go, you know somebody.”
Mr. Rosenfeld, the police spokesman, said that the video circulated by the rights groups was “edited and biased” and did not represent the scope of the events, and that Tariq was one of six people who were arrested Thursday after clashes in which 15 police officers were injured. It was another cousin, Tariq, a high school sophomore visiting from Tampa, Fla., for summer vacation, who was savagely beaten Thursday by what human rights groups said were undercover Israeli officers. “The continued state-sanctioned violence against children is unlawful and unacceptable,” Addameer, a Palestinian group that supports prisoners in Israeli jails, said in a news release that included photos of Tariq’s badly bruised face and hugely swollen lips.
“Hundreds of rioters, many of them masked, hurled at the forces pipe bombs, Molotov cocktails, fireworks and stones,” Mr. Rosenfeld said. “Preliminary investigation of the details of the incident shown in the video indicates that there were six masked Palestinians, and that three of them were armed with knives. They resisted arrest and attacked the officers. Jen Psaki, a State Department spokeswoman in Washington, said an American consular officer visited Tariq on Saturday, and she called for a “speedy, transparent and credible investigation,” strongly condemning “any excessive use of force.”
“How does a 15-year-old American student end up attacking security officers and rioting with hundreds of masked Palestinians?” he asked. Israel’s Justice Ministry opened an investigation on Saturday into what the justice minister, Tzipi Livni, called “a very serious incident by uniformed personnel.”
After hours of raging violence in Shuafat on Wednesday, there have been sporadic clashes between Palestinians and Israeli security forces there and in other neighborhoods of Jerusalem, as well as in Arab-Israeli towns and parts of the West Bank. Micky Rosenfeld, a spokesman for the Israel Police, said a video circulated by the rights groups was “edited and biased” and did not represent the scope of events. He said Tariq was one of six Palestinians arrested — three of them carrying knives — after a clash in which 15 officers were injured when “hundreds of rioters, many of them masked, hurled at the forces pipe bombs, Molotov cocktails, fireworks and stones.”
Maan, a Palestinian news agency, reported that dozens were injured in a clash east of Jerusalem, near the entrance to Maale Adumim, a large Jewish settlement. Ynet, an Israeli news site, said masked men burned tires, blocked roads, threw stones and beat drivers who admitted being Jewish in several Arab towns in Israel’s north. Mr. Rosenfeld said that there had been “no breakthroughs” Saturday in the investigation into whether Muhammad’s murder was an act of vengeance or some other kind of crime, and that “a gag order” prevented him from revealing what it had found so far. “It’s critical for us to determine what the motive was,” Mr. Rosenfeld said.
Cross-border violence also continued Saturday as Israel bombed three sites in Gaza after militants fired 14 rockets into southern Israel during the day. The pace of the police investigation stirred anger in Shuafat, where everyone seemed to have seen footage from security cameras that shows two men forcing Muhammad into a gray Hyundai. Two days earlier, several residents said, the same car stopped on the same street, and people they called “Jewish settlers” tried to kidnap 8-year-old Mousa Zaloum, slashing the boy’s neck and forearm with a knife. Some parents said they would no longer let youngsters walk alone to the store or take the bus.
The exchange continued a pattern since the June 12 abduction and murder of the three teenagers, for which Israel blames Hamas, the militant Islamic group that dominates Gaza. Hamas officials said Friday that discussions were underway to restore a cease-fire after Israel massed troops around Gaza, but Saturday’s activity indicated that it had not yet been secured. “Today is my cousin, tomorrow my son,” said Abir Abu Khdeir, 45, one of scores of mourning women in the shaded courtyard outside Muhammad’s home. “All Shuafat is in danger, all the settlers around us. It’s like a monster — they want to eat us.”
Muhammad’s mother, Suha, sat in the center, interrupting interviews to cover her tears with an orange washcloth. Muhammad was the fifth of her seven children, a goofy jokester who danced the dabke, a traditional line dance, in a folk troupe, was a devoted fan of the Real Madrid soccer team and went weekly to a neighborhood barber to keep the sides of his head closely shaven.
His mother said she had just given Muhammad a breakfast of labneh, or strained yogurt, cheese, mortadella and juice when he left at 3:30 a.m. Wednesday for the predawn prayer that starts the daily fast during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
“For the last four days, I didn’t see my son, I cannot bear it anymore — I call him all the time,” said Ms. Abu Khdeir, who wore flip-flops under a black abaya with white stitching at the cuffs. “I hope that the Jewish mothers feel what I am feeling,” she said. “May God burn them like I am burned.”