LISTEN: Recording of kidnapped teen's distress call to police released
Gil-Ad Shaer heard saying "they kidnapped me" at beginning of recording; police have been harshly criticized for failure to react quickly to call.
By BEN HARTMAN, JPOST.COM STAFF, LAHAV HARKOV, YAAKOV LAPPINMissing yeshiva student Gil-Ad Shaer(photo credit: Courtesy)
A voice quickly whispers, “They kidnapped me,” then someone says, “Heads down,” followed by what sounds like gunshots, in the emergency call Gil-Ad Shaer made to police on June 12.The recording was leaked to the public on Tuesday. It was previously under a gag order, but after the recording began criss-crossing the country on WhatsApp and social media on Tuesday, the gag order was partially lifted.In the beginning of the recording, Shaer can be heard saying, “They kidnapped me.” Hebrew-language radio can be heard in the background as well as voices speaking in Hebrew telling the three youths to put their heads down followed by what sounds like a burst of gunfire.Since they first learned of the kidnapping late on the night of June 12, the security forces have had a working assessment that the teenagers were murdered soon after being kidnapped, as they sat in the back seat of the vehicle they had entered at the hitchhiking post outside Alon Shvut. Although other possibilities continue to be weighed, according to this view, Shaer’s phone call to the police triggered an immediate end to their lives.The police have been heavily criticized for not responding quickly enough to the emergency call. An internal police probe led to the removal from their posts of four senior police officials.The 2 minute, 9 second call, which was received at 10:25 p.m. on June 12, was not given the proper urgency or handed over to security services until around five hours later, when one of the boy’s parents reported him missing to police.Despite that, the call was apparently seen as important, because the supervisor at the Judea and Samaria District Police dispatch station made eight attempts to call the number back. Seven of these were after the line went down, and of these, five went directly to voice mail.The handling of the call represented a severe failure “that ran along the entire chain of command at the center, crossing a series of police, officers and commanders,” police said on Monday.The incident represented “a failure of the utmost severity,” Israel Police Insp.- Gen. Yohanan Danino said on Monday. He vowed to improve service at police dispatch centers, which he called “the address the public turns to when they face trouble”.
The voice of MK Shelly Yacimovich (Labor), who was being interviewed by Israel Radio as the kidnapping took place, can be heard in the background of the recording talking about religious- secular relations.“For two weeks I’ve known about the tape and I have been thinking non-stop about what is now clear to all of us – that those were the last moments of these boys’ lives,” she wrote on Facebook Tuesday.Yacimovich said that defense sources told her that having an Israeli radio station playing was part of the terrorists’ way to trick and trap the teens.“I can’t stop thinking of the surrealistic gap between the relaxed interview that took place in my backyard in order to not disturb my children and their friends in the house, and what happened at that moment to three other children, younger than mine,” she wrote.The MK contrasted “the relaxed interview I gave and the terrible violence that took place to its sounds....You can hear me being interviewed, the background noise to tragedy and terror in the car."“The pain after these lives were cut short at such a young age is so, so great. May their memory be for a blessing,” Yacimovich said.Jerusalem Post staff contributed to this report.
