Palestinian Charged With Murder In Jerusalem Light Rail Stabbing
JERUSALEM (JTA) — The Palestinian man who stabbed a British woman to death on the Jerusalem light rail was charged with premeditated murder.
The indictment against Jamil Tamimi, 57, of the Ras al-Amud neighborhood of eastern Jerusalem, was filed Thursday by the Jerusalem District Attorney’s Office.
Hannah Bladon, 21, who died of her injuries after being stabbed multiple times in the chest by Tamimi with an 18.5 cm kitchen knife, was in Israel as part of a student exchange program with Hebrew University as part of her course of studies in religion, theology and archaeology at the University of Birmingham. She arrived in Israel in January and was returning home from an archeological dig when she was stabbed on April 14.
The indictment said that Tamimi chose to attack Bladon because she looked like a weak and easy target.
Tamimi reportedly has been found fit to stand trial by a psychiatrist at the Jerusalem district of the state prosecution, though he reportedly told investigators that he stabbed Bladon because he wanted the soldier standing next to her to kill him and had previously tried to commit suicide. He had checked himself out of the Kfar Shaul Mental Health Center the day before the attack.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO