Last update - 00:00 10/02/2007
Police: Palestinian van driver in Negev crash never held license
By Mijal Grinberg and Eli Ashkenazi, Haaretz Correspondents
The driver responsible for Saturday's northern Negev car crash which killed three members of the same family and injured over a dozen more never held a driver's license, Police announced on Sunday.
Police identified the GMC van driver, who sustained light to moderate injuries in the accdient, as a resident of the West Bank town of Yatta, near Hebron.
An off duty police officer who happened to witness the accident said the van driver ran a red light at Plugot near the southern city of Kiryat Gat where two highways intersect and struck a car which had entered the intersection.
Three people were killed and 16 injured in the Saturday afternoon collision. The victims were the driver of the car, 57-year-old Nicolai Levotin, his daughter, Olga Ya'akovenco, 30, and Paulina Ya'akovenco, 72.
Olga Ya'akovenco's 8-year-old son suffered serious injuries and was taken to Barzilai Hospital in Ashkelon for treatment.
The child's condition improved markedly overnight, and doctors said Sunday that he had regained consciousness.
Police said the driver of the GMC van was transporting 14 illegal residents from the village of Dura, near the West Bank city of Hebron. The vehicle was en route to a construction site in the city of Modi'in, roughly halfway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. The driver and all of his passengers were injured in the crash, four of them seriously.
Police Chief Superintendent Ze'ev Gutman said early Sunday that the identity of the driver, who is under arrest, had yet to be determined. He said that it was possible that the driver is a Palestinian from the territories, a suspicion which was later confirmed.
"From time to time we encounter cases in which vehicles bearing Israeli license plates succeed in penetrating from the territories in our direction, Gutman told Israel Radio. "It is possible that this is one of those cases."
The injured passengers were admitted to Barzilai Hospital in Ashkelon, Kaplan Hospital in Rehovot and Soroka Medical Center in Be'er Sheva.