A 15-year-old girl reported to police on Tuesday that two Arab youths tried to convince her to get in their car near the village of Abu Gosh, located just to the west of Jerusalem, in what appears to be a kidnapping attempt.
Fearing that she was in danger of being abducted, the girl fled and contacted the police.
Twenty minutes later, police tracked down a car meeting the description given by the girl, and the two Arab suspects were brought in for investigation.
The suspected kidnapping comes after Hamas terrorists kidnapped and murdered Naftali Frenkel (16), Eyal Yifrah (19) and Gilad Sha’ar (16) on June 12, abducted them from a hitchhiking station in Judea’s Gush Etzion area; the bodies of the three were found last Monday.
Large-scale violent Arab riots broke out in Jerusalem and spread to other areas of Israel after 16-year-old Mohammed Abu Khder, an Arab resident of Jerusalem, was found burned to death last Wednesday after being abducted.
The murder has been widely suspected as being an act of “revenge” by Jewish extremists for the murder of the three teens; reports from a family member claim that the main suspect in the murder has psychological problems.
This most recent suspected kidnapping attempt comes following several false alarms, including two reported kidnapping attempts on Monday that were found to be false after police investigations. Israelis have been understandably nervous since the abduction and murder of the three Israeli teens, as well as fears that the revenge attack could spark further similar kidnappings.
In the first, which was received in the afternoon, citizens reported that a child was forced into a van driven by Arab men near Modi’in.
Large security forces were deployed to the area, where they discovered that the van belonged to Jews. Police eventually reached the conclusion that no kidnapping had occurred.
Later on Monday, reports of another kidnapping in Rehasim, a town to the east of Haifa, were received by police. After investigation, the reports were also found to be false.
