Last update - 00:00 29/04/2007
Police to partially reopen Tair Rada murder investigation
By Eli Ashkenazi, Haaretz Correspondent
The police have decided to partially reopen the investigation into the murder of 13-year-old Katzrin resident Tair Rada, the police notified her family Sunday evening.
Rada's body was found on December 6, 2006 in a bathroom stall in the Nofei Golan High School in Katzrin, where she was enrolled as a student.
Up until now, the State Prosecutor's Office has rejected the Rada family's repeated requests to reopen the investigation.
The completion of the investigation will focus on writing that was found on the victim's body. The word "HURT" had been written in purple marker on the back of Rada's hand, and underneath it were written in Hebrew the words "English notebook."
The Rada family's attorney Shira Maroz has argued in the past that the handwriting was never inspected or matched to the victim's. It was assumed that Tair Rada had written the words, but Maroz argued that the possibility that the killer had written them was never ruled out.
According to Maroz, the family was surprised to learn the police were planning to reopen the case.
Police investigators are scheduled to visit the Rada family home Monday and collect several of the victim's school notebooks as writing samples for comparison. Should the investigators conclude that the handwriting does not match the victim's, they are likely to widen the investigation.
Until now, the police have refused the family's requests to view photographs of the writing found on the body.
Maroz told Israel's Channel 10, who first reported the reopening of the investigation, that Tair's mother Ilana had said that it was very uncharacteristic for her daughter to write on her hand. She added that Ilana had inquired with her daughter's friends on the day of the murder if they had seen anything written on Tair's hands, and the friends said that they hadn't seen anything.