The accused father in a hearing in the Be'er Sheva District Court in May 2021
The accused father in a hearing in the Be'er Sheva District Court in May 2021Flash90

A father who murdered his 14-year-old son earlier this year was released after the Prosecutor's Office decided to delay proceedings on the case due to the fact that the father was under the influence of a drug at the time, Kikar Hashabbat reported.

In March, it was reported that a father from Kiryat Gat had stabbed his teenage son multiple times before fleeing the scene. The son was evacuated to a local hospital, where he died of his wounds.

Israel's Deputy Attorney General Amit Marari decided that the father could be released from his arrest, after it became clear that at the time of the murder, he was under the influence of hallucinatory drugs provided to him by his alternative practitioner.

Explaining her decision, Marari wrote that it is "in light of the unusual and special circumstances of the case, including the background against which the crime was committed, its tragic consequences, and the personal circumstances of the suspect."

Meanwhile, the alternative practitioner has been indicted and charged with six counts of exporting, importing, trafficking, and providing dangerous drugs.

The father's lawyers, Yehuda Fried and Tal Gabay, responded to the decision by saying, "The fact that the Deputy Attorney General decided to accede to our request and ordered, in an unprecedented fashion, to halt the legal proceedings against our client for the charge of murder, shows the justice of our claims from the first."

It added that the boy's death was a "direct result" of the fact that the father, a normative person and a loving father, fell victim to a charlatan "practitioner" who used his patients' vulnerable state to provide drugs under the guise of medical treatment. It was the drug provided by the practitioner which according to the district psychiatrist was the direct cause of the father's severe mental deterioration and psychotic episode, which led him to kill his son.

"Under these circumstances, it is clear that there was no place to continue the legal processes against the father, and that instead, we must do everything possible to bring the practitioner, Mr. Eliad Landau, to justice for his responsibility for the killing of the child."