In the video: two young men from the Haifa area were accused of stealing a weapon from a soldier of the Agoz unit/Israel Police spokesmen
Yosef Evali, 32 years old from Ebalin, a prisoner in Rimonim prison, was arrested in May 2019 on suspicion of stealing 30 16-M rifles from the school for naval officers in Acre, which the IDF transferred to the Ministry of Education for the purpose of training recruits. In 2021, the district court sentenced him to 7 years in prison and compensation to the state of NIS 15,000. On appeal, the sentence was increased to 10 years, but the other elements of the sentence remained the same.
The public prosecutor's office learned about the disclosure in Vala, and filed a lawsuit in 2022. Yesterday (Thursday), the state won the verdict A precedent in the city's Magistrate's Court required the prisoner to compensate the state for the value of the loot - a million and a half shekels.
The state attorney's office, through the attorney Osherit Peleg from the proactive civil lawsuits department of the Haifa district attorney's office, who is looking for creative ways to settle accounts with criminals, argued in court that accepting the lawsuit Send a message to gun offenders that the state will not be satisfied with prison sentences and the exhaustion of the criminal process alone, and that it sees the civil tools at its disposal as a complementary means of combating the perpetrators of crime and violence. As a precedent, the state claimed the value of the weapons according to their price on the black market, between 50 and 100 thousand shekels For a standard 16-M rifle, and not according to their cost to the Ministry of Defense, according to an estimate about NIS 1,500 for the rifle.
The affair was cracked by the Central Police Unit of the Coastal District. At first, Ewali was accused of breaking into the school with others, after they cut the surrounding fence and the lock of the warehouse and stole 49 guns from it. These weapons were delivered to the school by military authorities after being proactively disabled by "protections", when the "protections" can be easily disabled. The Naval Officers' School negligently kept them in storage. The theft was discovered later. In the end, according to Oali's confession, he was convicted of stealing 30 M-16 weapons. His partners in the burglary remain unknown and the weapons have never been found.
The accused said that he received NIS 60,000, "on account", from some merchant, who promised him an additional amount for selling the weapons. "The result of his arguments and his behavior in the proceedings before me is that the weapons themselves were not disposed of, unfortunately," stated Judge Roital Baum, who ordered him to pay compensation to the state in a lawsuit filed as part of a collaboration between the criminal and civil prosecutor's offices. The purpose of the cooperation is, among other things, "increasing governance and efforts to reduce crime also through civil-economic means."
Awali, married and the father of 4 children, claimed that his goal was to bring money. "I don't understand weapons, I don't know what a weapon is, the friend suggested to me, my goal was to bring money because I had no food at home. I didn't think about loss, nor about profit, I didn't think that people would be murdered with this weapon," he told the court , "I know that I committed a very serious offense and that I may have caused people to kill each other, I eat myself every day for what I did and I also regret it."
Judge Reutel Baum listened, but at the same time determined that "real economic rehabilitation involves paying for actions done". She stated that "His understanding of the seriousness of his actions and the consequences that could result from them is a desirable behavior, but wisdom in hindsight, which it is not known whether it would have come if he had not been caught, cannot reduce the damage he caused by the serious act, no matter how difficult his financial situation may be. What has been done - cannot be returned , and regretting an act done can - perhaps - prevent its recurrence in the future, but not change the past."