Dutch Police Use DNA To Arrest Suspect From 1990 Murder Mystery
AMSTERDAN — Based on DNA analysis, Dutch police arrested an Israeli man whom they say killed an Israeli woman in the Netherlands 26 years ago.
Officer re-investigating the case identified the suspect in the 1990 lethal stabbing of Miriam Sharon in The Hague as Daniel Amunah, a 52-year-old Israeli man with a history of property and drug-related crimes who had been briefly considered as a suspect in the Netherlands directly after Sharon’s death but released for lack of evidence, Ynet on Friday reported.
Amunah was arrested again in August this year in connection with Sharon’s death based on newly-discovered DNA evidence upon entering the Netherlands, according to Ynet. The report revealed for the first time the identity of the suspect who was arrested in August and that he was believed by police to be the killer. According to Een Vandaag, the Dutvh investigative journalism television program, the new evidence analyzed by the cold case team that Dutch police appointed to reexamine the case included a cigarette butt and a black leather coat.
Sharon left Israel in 1979 for the Netherlands, where she settled and married a local artist. Sharon, who was in her late thirties when she died, had two children with the artist before separating from him in the 1980s. The Ynet report did not provide information on how Dutch police see the relationship between Sharon and Amunah, or his purported motives for allegedly killing her.
Amunah has been in and out of jail in Israel since he was 17, the Ynet report said. He completing serving his last stretch in 2014.
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