Three Israelis confess to gruesome killing of Palestinian teenager

Three of the main suspects, arrested in the gruesome murder of 16-year-old Palestinian early this month, has confessed to abducting him and burning him alive.

In a court publication released on Monday, the suspects, two of them minors, told interrogators that in killing Mohammed Abu Khudair, they sought revenge for the murder of three Jewish seminary students in the occupied West Bank, Reuters news agency reported.

The three are remanded until Friday by an Israeli court pending a formal indictment, have also been sent for psychiatric observation.

According to the news portal Arutz Sheva 7, medical checks revealed that the central suspect in the incident has a history of deep psychiatric problems.

Police said he had also been arrested two years ago on suspicion that he tried to strangle his baby daughter. He has been receiving psychiatric treatment ever since.

“I expect soon to get the investigative material, in which I will look for support for the assessment there is a complex problem in the matter of my client’s culpability,” an attorney for Honenu, an ultranationalist legal aid organisation told Reuters.

In the incident on July 2, the three suspects were said to have patrolled Arab neighbourhoods of Jerusalem in an attempt to find a victim to abduct.

They spotted Mohammed Abu Khudair, bundled him into their car and drove to a forest outside the city.

The 29-year-old suspect then beat the Palestinian teenager on the head with a tyre iron while the other two suspects, both 17-year-olds, doused him with fuel and lit it, according to Israel’s Shin Bet security agency.

The incident helped trigger a week of Israel-Hamas fighting around the Gaza Strip which has since killed more than 172 Palestinians, most of them civilians.