Dubai: Five young Arab men living in the Galilee, a mountainous region in northern Israel, have been arrested for gang-raping a mentally disabled 17-year-old girl, local media reported.
Three of the suspects are brothers while the fourth one is their cousin and the fifth is their friend.
It was reported that the prime suspect came to know the victim through the online game PUBG. According to reports, the girl had been playing PUBG on social media where she messaged one of the players in Arabic. The player did not understand Arabic so he passed on the conversation to a friend seated next to him who spoke Arabic. He was identified as Rashid Nasser.
Nasser drove to the girl’s home, even though she found it difficult to explain to him where she was, and took her to a forest. He called three of his friends to join them – Mohammed and Tamer Nasser, and Maher Badran, and all four raped the girl one by one and forced her to smoke hashish. Afterwards, they called the fifth defendant, Udi Nasser, who arrived and drove the girl home, assaulting her on the way as well.
The crime came to light when the girl’s parents reported to the police that she had gone missing, and security camera footage taken near their home showed her getting into an unidentified car.
Four hours later she returned home, and her parents informed the police. Investigators asked the family to come to the station to provide details, where it turned out the girl had been sexually assaulted.
She described to investigators what had happened. The family hadn’t complained about a sexual assault and investigators learned this had happened when they spoke with the girl. A child specialist from Israel's Labour and Social Services Ministry took preliminary testimony from the girl, and understood she had suffered a gang rape.
She had a large number of bruises and required medical care. After being taken for an examination, she led police investigators to the scene of the crime, in a forest near Carmiel. The car in which the rape took place was found abandoned.
Prosecutors asked the Haifa District Court to keep the suspects in custody until the end of their trial. The request said that the suspects, identified as Rashid Nasser, Mohammed Nasser, Tamer Nasser, Maher Badran and Udi Nasser, aged 23 to 32 ought to remain behind bars in light of the high level of danger expected from the five, who acted against a minor with horrifying brutality. All the suspects live in the Arab towns of Rameh and Bi’ina in the Upper Galilee region of northern Israel.
