Police search for husband of murdered Eritrean

An Eritrean woman was found murdered in an apartment near Tel Aviv’s Central Bus Station on Sunday, and police have designated her husband as the main suspect in the killing and are currently searching for him.

The murder took place at a building at 20 Solomon Street, on a strip thick with brothels, drug dens and African migrant bars. Inside the building, light blue hallways lead to small, divided apartments housing African migrants, typically in cramped conditions.It was in one of these apartments on the third floor that police found the woman on Sunday afternoon, in critical condition shortly before she passed away. A paramedic from the ZAKA rescue and recovery organization, who was helping collect the woman’s body, said she was found with a single fatal stab wound, the knife still embedded in her neck. He added that there were no children or any other people living in the apartment with the young couple, who Tel Aviv police said were in their 20s.

In the early evening Sunday, a lone Sudanese man who had just returned from work sat on a six-pack of water in one of the building’s stairwells, waiting to be allowed up to his apartment on the floor where the murder took place.

Groups of African migrants huddled outside the murder scene, watching the forensic officers in their white sterile gowns walk in and out of the building, speaking in Tigrinya and Arabic. When asked if he was at the building when the murder took place, an African man standing outside the building began pointing at a streetwalker, saying she had short-changed him earlier in the day, before eventually adding that he knew nothing of the killing.

The incident was one in an almost daily series of such violent acts between African migrants on the strip, according to Yossi Natani, a 60-yearold Israeli who owns a kiosk in the building next door.

Natani, who said he has run the store for 20 years, said that “every night something happens, they get drunk and fight with each other every night, throw bottles everywhere – its always like this.”

Natani said he was not at work at the time of the murder, and that he only came in at 3 p.m. to work until 11.

He added that investigators had been in and out of the building all day, and that in the late afternoon they took surveillance video from his store, which has seven cameras set up in and around its perimeter.

A source at the Foreign Ministry said that in cases like the one Sunday, after police are finished with their pathological investigation of the body, the ministry will contact the Eritrean mission in Tel Aviv to arrange for the return of the remains.