The police investigation into the death of Yuval Kestelman, who neutralized a terrorist in an attack at the entrance to Jerusalem and was shot to death by a reservist, is riddled with failures and oversights, as was revealed on Kan 11.
The investigation that was aired revealed the contradictory testimony of Superintendent Kogan who claimed that he decided not to send Kestelman’s body for an autopsy because the identity of the shooter was known and the doctors at the Shaare Zedek Medical Center told him that no bullets were found in the body.
Dr. Alon Schwartz, the doctor who treated Yuval, completely denied the policeman's claim: "There is no way we said there were no bullets in the body, because we knew there were. There really is no question, just no one asked."
The investigation also brought up a conversation that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had with Yuval's father, Moshe, after he had spoken at a press conference the day before, about the shooting incident and summed up Yuval's death with the sentence "That’s life." Netanyahu admitted in the conversation that he did not know the facts.
Kestelman, a 38-year-old Military Police fighter and former police officer, was on his way to work, as a lawyer at the Civil Service Commission, when he suddenly realized that he was witnessing a terrorist attack. Two terrorists stopped their car near a busy bus stop on the way out of Jerusalem, got out and started shooting at everyone. They killed three people and wounded many others. Kestelman shot at the terrorists with his personal pistol.
He killed one of the terrorists but then he realized that he was in the soldiers’ firing range, who had come from the other side and were also shooting at the terrorists. Kestelman dropped his gun, ran back down the road and waved his hands in the air so that they would not shoot him. Reserve duty soldier Aviad Frija continued to shoot in Yuval's direction, even when Yuval had already crouched down, taken off his coat to show that he did not have an explosive belt, waved his hands to surrender, and threw his wallet with his personal identity certificates towards them. Yuval was mortally wounded by several gunshots and died of his wounds in the hospital.
While the police investigation department determined that the conduct of the police, despite being very bad, was not flawed, the family is convinced that there was a deliberate intention to close the investigation of the case.
"There have been quite a few mistakes, and some that were not simple at all. These are mistakes for which you had to pay a price. What happened here, the autopsy should have been done; it’s terrible. There were many things that should have been handled differently, but there was no fault in the criminal aspect of any of the policemen," explained Keren Bar-Menachem, head of the police investigation department, to the Kestelman family last April, when she informed them of the decision to close the investigation into the case.