A Ukrainian detained for more than sixteen years in Israel for the murder of a teenager was acquitted on Thursday March 30 after a fourth trial in a legal saga that unleashes passions.
For a few hours, the affair completely eclipsed the political crisis that is shaking the country over the justice reform wanted by the government and shouted down in the streets.
Israeli news channels were live from the Nazareth District Court long before the court announced that it had "
acquitted [...] defendant Roman Zdorov of the murder of Taïr Rada
".
“Justice is done”
At the pronouncement of the verdict, broadcast by a live video link, the person concerned, surrounded by his wife and his son burst into tears.
"
The truth has finally triumphed
," he said as he left the court as a free man.
"
Justice has been done, for the first time
," Ilana Rada, the victim's mother, told the press, accusing the public prosecutor of mishandling the case and convicting a false culprit.
“
The next step is to start looking for the murderers.
And we know where to go
, ”she said, sibylline.
Aged 13, Taïr Rada was found with her throat slit on December 6, 2006, bathing in her blood in the toilets of her school in Katzrin, a town in the Syrian Golan occupied by Israel since 1967. A few days later, the police arrested Roman Zdorov, construction worker married to an Israeli and employed on a construction site in the school.
He was then 28 years old.
A country in shock
Her trial, followed everywhere in a country shocked by the brutal murder of the teenager, will last four years.
Roman Zdorov confesses to the murder and will even reconstruct the crime, before retracting.
In 2010, he was sentenced to life for premeditated murder.
Following a new expertise on the knife used for the murder, the Supreme Court orders that the case be retried and the Nazareth court finds him guilty again in 2014, a decision upheld the following year by the Supreme Court.
After the filing of new scientific evidence by his lawyers, the Supreme Court orders the reopening of the trial in 2021, which ended on Thursday with a verdict concluding that there was a "solid and reasonable doubt" on the
guilt
. of the accused, which the public prosecutor has "
failed to demonstrate
" irrefutably.
Roman Zdorov's imprisonment had been converted to house arrest soon after the latest high court decision.
His acquittal immediately reignited the controversy over the murder of Taïr Rada.
Followers of the thesis of the guilt of the Ukrainian and supporters of that of his innocence have published books or films on the subject, at the origin of theories of all kinds, some of which are conspiratorial, especially since no imprint Roman Zdorov's footsteps were found at the crime scene, where, on the other hand, unidentified fingerprints and traces of blood from a third party were found.
The case even reached an international audience after the Israeli documentary series Shadow
of Truth was released
on the Netflix video streaming platform.
"Reaching the Truth"
Since the beginning of the case, the prosecution "
has spared no effort to reach the truth
", said the Ministry of Justice in a press release published after the judgment to recall its intimate conviction of the guilt of the accused.
"
The Prosecutor's Office will study the verdict in detail before deciding whether or not to appeal
," adds the text.
Barely closed the parenthesis of the emotions aroused by the decision of the judges of Nazareth, Simcha Rothman, the president of the Parliamentary Commission of the laws, one of the main actors of the majority on the file of the justice reform, relayed on Twitter a message seeing in this whole affair "
a new feat of a [judicial] system which is not subject to any independent evaluation procedure
".
Merav Michaeli, leader of the Labor Party, an opposition party now in a very small minority, very quickly denounced these remarks as a “
cynical attempt to exploit the verdict
” of Nazareth for political ends.
