ISIS terrorist Wasim a-Sayed who brutally murdered Tamar, 68, H’yd, and Yehuda Kaduri, 71, H’yd, in January  2019 was sentenced by the Jerusalem District Court on Monday to three life sentences and 40 years in prison for the murder of the Kadouri couple, the murder of a Moldovan foreign worker, and additional attempted murders.

The grisly murder of the Kaduri couple in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Armon Hanatziv rocked the nation at the time and developed into a huge scandal after police arrested one of the couple’s Chareidi sons and his wife as suspects in the murder. They were eventually released due to lack of evidence. The grisly murder remained unsolved until 2022, when it was discovered that the double homicide was carried out by a-Sayed, 34, a resident of Chevron and an ISIS supporter, following another attack when he murdered Ivan Tarnowskia, a Moldovan foreign worker, at his apartment in Jerusalem, and injured another Moldovan foreign worker.

The day before he murdered the Kaduris, a-Sayed attempted to murder a teenage girl, Hadar Betzalel, as she waited at the bus stop in the morning in Armon Hanatziv. She was lightly injured and was hospitalized with stab wounds to her hand and neck but the perpetrator escaped and was never found. Following the murder of the Kaduris a day later, the girl’s mother, Merav Betzalel, told Ynet that she is positive that the incidents were connected.

The defendant was convicted of two counts of premeditated murder; one count of murder under aggravated circumstances, two counts of attempted murder as an act of terrorism, and additional offenses, including his membership in the Islamic State organization, ISIS.

The judges ruled that the life sentences and the 40-year sentence would run consecutively and also ruled that the murders committed by the defendant are exceptional in their severity, which means that he cannot be released in the future as part of a hostage release deal. The defendant was also ordered to pay the maximum compensation to the victims of the crime due to the murders, as well as additional compensation to the victims of the attempted murder.

In the verdict, which began with a quote from Chaim Nachman Bialik’s poem ‘על השחיטה,’ the panel of judges referred to the fact that the defendant slaughtered three people by slitting their throats and attempted to slaughter two more solely because of their Jewish identity, or because he thought they were Jewish.

(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)