Muhammad Awieda of East Jerusalem allegedly drove Bashar Massalha, who killed US citizen Taylor Force, to scene of terror attack
An East Jerusalem man was charged Tuesday for allegedly aiding a terrorist who killed an American tourist during a stabbing spree in Jaffa in March.
Muhammad Awieda was indicted by the Jerusalem District Court for driving the stabber, Bashar Massalha, from his West Bank hometown of Qalqilya to Tel Aviv.
Awieda faces the charges of manslaughter, conspiring to commit an attack, and illegally transporting a Palestinian into Israel.
Massalha, 22, killed US citizen Taylor Force and injured 10 others in a rampage along the Jaffa boardwalk on March 8. He was killed by security forces at the scene of the attack.
Police at the time said the terrorist first stabbed three people along the Jaffa boardwalk, a popular site for shopping and leisure, before fleeing inland toward the city’s Kikar Hasha’on, where he stabbed three more people.
He then went on to stab at least four people near the Dolphinarium in Tel Aviv.
The attack coincided with a visit by US Vice President Joe Biden, who was meeting with Shimon Peres minutes away from the scene.
Force was a US Army veteran who had done tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. He graduated from West Point Military Academy in 2009 and served as a field artillery officer from 2009 to 2014 at Fort Hood.
Twenty-nine Israelis and four foreign nationals have been killed in Palestinian terrorism and violence since October 2015. Some 200 Palestinians have been killed, around two-thirds of them while attacking Israelis, and the rest during clashes with troops, according to the Israeli army.
As reported by The Times of Israel