Police officers found the dead body of an Arab taxi driver from eastern Jerusalem in a Tel Aviv apartment on Monday. According to police sources, a Jewish 25-year-old new immigrant from France confessed to murdering the driver, saying that the victim was selected "because he was an Arab."
On Monday afternoon, police officers spotted two men meandering down the center of the busy Allenby Street in Tel Aviv. The officers stopped the two men for a few standard questions regarding a search for thieves in which the policemen were engaged.
After a brief interrogation, one of the men revealed that he had murdered someone. He then led the officers to an apartment on Yonah HaNavi Street in Tel Aviv, where the body of a 35-year-old man was discovered lying in a pool of blood. His throat had been slashed. Police immediately arrested the two suspects, who turned out to be brothers aged 21 and 25, both originally from France.
Initial questioning revealed that one of the men had ordered a taxi from eastern Jerusalem on Sunday or Monday. When the taxi driver arrived, one of the suspects allegedly got him to come into the Yonah HaNavi Street apartment, where he was murdered.
Police said that background checks of the suspects revealed no criminal past, feeding suspicions of a nationalist motivation for the murder. The suspect himself apparently admitted that he had "decided to murder an Arab." Investigators from the General Security Services (GSS), Israel's internal secret service, were called in as well.
Jerusalem Mayor Uri Lupoliansky said that the murdered man, a resident of Beit Hanina in eastern Jerusalem, should be recognized as a victim of terrorism.