Last update - 00:00 10/12/2006
No clear recipient of NIS 100,000 bounty for rapist Benny Sela
By Haaretz Service
Two days after escaped serial rapist Benny Sela was found and taken into custody, it remained unclear on Sunday who would be awarded the NIS 100,000 bounty offered for information leading to his capture on Friday night.
During most of Sela's two weeks at large, the search had focused on Tel Aviv and the nearby Sharon area. But on Thursday, police received an intelligence tip that the rapist was hiding up north, and Friday morning, the first citizen sighting of Sela in the north, near Lake Kinneret, was reported.
Baruch Mazor, dirctor of a foundation that offered the reward, told Army Radio Sunday that dozens of people have come forward to request the reward. "We don't yet know who [the recipient] will be. We will be consulting with the police and will try to find the people to reward."
Among those who have been mentined as possibloe recipients are a woman soldier from Kibbutz Kinneret who supplied police with a description of Sela on the morning of his capture, and members of Sela's family, who tipped officers to the escapees' intention to visit relatives in the northern town of Nesher.
Police: Sela's errors led to recapture
Police have said that it was a series of mistakes by escaped rapist Benny Sela - from stealing a car that could be easily traced to visiting his foster family - that ultimately led to his recapture Friday night, police officers said.
At about 2:30 P.M. Friday, a Pardes Hannah resident reported that his Honda had been stolen, and his description of the stolen car matched the description of the vehicle in that morning's sighting of Sela near the Kinneret. Police consequently widely circulated a description of the stolen vehicle. Later, they were to say that had the car's owner not waited more than 10 hours before reporting the theft, Sela would probably have been caught sooner.
At about 4 P.M., Sela's presence in the north was definitively confirmed, when he was captured on film by a security camera at the entrance to Kibbutz Kinneret. At that point, the police decided to set up roadblocks throughout the area.
Further confirmation came at about 6 P.M., when Sela's foster family informed the police that he had shown up at their home in Nesher, but left again when they refused to let him eat and shower there.
Soon, further reports began coming in from observant citizens who said they had seen him, and he appeared to be heading toward Acre and Nahariya. But the final breakthrough came when Nahariya resident Rina Grimberg called the police to report that while driving from Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot to Nahariya, she had seen a suspicious-looking Honda pull off the road, turn off its lights and try to drive in reverse.
Two policemen, Sergeant Major Assaf Dib and Lance Corporal Asraf Abid, were sent off to investigate Grimberg's report, and when Sela saw them coming, he tried to flee. The two promptly gave chase and caught him - still not knowing, at that point, who he was. Since it was 8 P.M. and dark out, they were unable to see him clearly, and he spoke to them in Arabic and insisted that he was a resident of a nearby Arab village. "From our standpoint, we simply stopped a suspect with a stolen car," said Dib.
Only when they brought him into the Nahariya police station did it become clear that the suspect was indeed the escaped rapist.
The media were quickly summoned to the Nahariya police station, where the escaped rapist was shown off in a manner that elicited a public complaint from MK Zahava Gal-On (Meretz) and even off-the-record protests from some policemen. "It would have been possible to [photograph him] in a more spacious area," instead of in a small and crowded room, "and not to compel him forcibly to raise his head and expose his face," said one officer. "I had the feeling of a media lynching against him. The pictures reminded me of the humiliating pictures of Saddam Hussein's arrest."
But senior police officers indignantly rejected these charges, terming them "media hypocrisy."
"The dozens of journalists were the ones who pressed us to [let them] photograph the arrested Sela - among other things, to calm the public," said one. "It's impossible to forget what the purpose of publishing these pictures was, and who we are talking about."
Police Commissioner Moshe Karadi, who also blamed the press for the incident, added that in light of the criticism, the police may refuse to let the media into police stations should there be similar high-profile captures in the future.