Two men and a woman in their 60s were arrested early Sunday on suspicion of involvement in a murder and a suspected murder in the Jerusalem area in the mid-1980s and early ’90s.
The suspects, who are Jerusalem residents, will be brought to court Sunday to have their detention extended.
The suspects, the police say, are members of the Shuvu Banim Hasidic sect led by Rabbi Eliezer Berland, who has done prison time for sexual offenses.
One of the two cases from the ’80s and ’90s is of a teenager, Nissim Shitrit, missing since 1986 and believed to have been murdered. The police suspect that Shitrit disappeared after a falling-out with a criminal who became an associate a few weeks before Shitrit went missing, or because of an entanglement with other criminal elements.
The suspects were also allegedly involved in the 1990 murder of Avraham Edri, who left the yeshiva where he was a student and was found dead in Jerusalem’s Ramot Forest the next day.
In an investigative report two years ago on Kan 11 television, journalist Shani Haziza pointed out the possible link with Berland’s sect; at the time, the suspects operated so-called modesty guards for the sect, Haziza reported.
According to the report, at the time of Shitrit’s disappearance and Edri’s murder, the two were involved in romantic relationships with women in Jerusalem. The report triggered the police investigation.
During Haziza’s work on her report, her cellphone went missing; the police recovered it and demanded access to its contents, claiming they could greatly help the investigation. Haziza refused and the case is now with the courts.
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