Last update - 00:00 18/02/2008
Expert: Suspect's footprints found on pants of murdered Golan girl
By Eli Ashkenazi, Haaretz Correspondent
Tair Rada's pants had multiple fragments of bloody shoe prints identical to the pair worn by the accused, Roman Zadorov, on the day the 13-year-old girl was murdered in December 2006 in the restroom of a Katzrin school, a forensics expert testified Sunday in Nazarath District Court.
Police Superintendent Yaron Shor spent several hours explaining precisely how markings of a shoe print found on the girl's jeans matched Zadorov's shoes. He said the shoe-print investigation took hundreds of hours, at the end of which it was concluded that there is a very high likelihood that the markings on the victim's pants were made by a pair of Salamander shoes Zadorov was wearing.
The markings on the pants were found at the central headquarters fibers lab on December 26, 2006, about a week after Zadorov confessed and reconstructed the murder. Zadorov subsequently recanted and continues to maintain his innocence.
Shor described his efforts to ascertain how popular the German-made shoes are in Israel. The specific type of sole on Zadorov's shoes was not produced after 2001, and production of Salamander shoes in general stopped after 2004. Salamander shoes were not imported to Israel, with the exception of one occasion, on which several hundred pairs matching Zadorov's size were sold here.
With a total of 50 million pairs of shoes in the country, "The particular model of Salamander found on Rada's pants is extremely rare," Shor testified. After Shor's legwork greatly narrowed the likelihood of a match, lab work uncovered the markings unique to the soles of Zadorov's shoes. Shor described the painstaking task of isolating these unique signs left by the shoes from all the "background noise" found on the jeans.
Zadorov's lawyer, David Spiegel, confronted Shor with the fact that the restroom stall had foot prints not belonging to Zadorov on the toilet seat cover, the toilet tank, and the beam separating the stalls. He also pointed out that there were no shoe prints on the floor from Zadorov, "who is not blessed with a supernatural ability to fly."
Shor replied that "a person can step in a puddle of blood and when he lifts his foot he will not leave a clear print, but rather a bloodstain on the floor."
The defense intends to bring a forensics expert from the United States to testify on its behalf.
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