Site of the Lion's Gate stabbing
Site of the Lion's Gate stabbingMDA Jerusalem

An indictment was submitted on Wednesday against three Arab residents of Jerusalem's Old City, charging them with aiding the terrorist Muhannad Muhastab from Hevron in his stabbing attack in the Old City two weeks ago.

In the attack at the Old City's Lion's Gate, the 18-year-old terrorist moderately wounded a 60-year-old Jewish man. The terrorist fled the scene but was tracked down by police around two hours later.

Police have gathered a basis of evidence against the three Arab accomplices, allowing the attorney's office to charge them with aiding a crime and disrupting legal procedures.

The indictment describes how on May 2, immediately after the terrorist conducted the stabbing and escaped into one of the Old City's alleyways, he met two of the accused.

One of them accompanied him towards the Flowers Gate (also known as Herod's Gate) in order to show him the way, and on the way there the terrorist told him that he was the one who conducted the attack.

When they saw that the gate had been closed in order to prevent the terrorist's escape, the suspect who accompanied the terrorist told him that he would help him avoid the police and exit the Old City, and they entered a residential building in order to hide from the officers and the security cameras.

The two other suspects joined them at the building, and then one of them took the terrorist to his home located adjacent to the building. There he gave him clothes to change into, and allowed him to wash the victim's blood off of himself and hide in his house.

When police officers arrived in the area, one of the suspects ran from the residential building to the site where the terrorist was being hid and told him that police were in the area and they needed to escape.

The suspects transferred the terrorist to an adjacent house where he hid - until the police managed to hunt him down and arrest him.

The collusion in the case brings to mind a lethal stabbing early last October that also took place in the Old City.

In that attack Arab doctors are suspected of having ignored the wounds of a young woman Adele Bennett and her infant son, and shop owners abused and jeered her as she ran for help, after her husband Aharon Bennett and another Jewish man Rabbi Nehemia Lavi were murdered by a terrorist.