Egypt returns body of Israeli found dead in Sinai

Body with five gunshot wounds likely washed up on Sinai shore near Gaza border after being murdered in Israel or Gaza.

By JOANNA PARASZCZUK, BEN HARTMAN
Police generic in english crime scene 370 (photo credit: REUTERS/Navesh Chitrakar)
Police generic in english crime scene 370
(photo credit: REUTERS/Navesh Chitrakar)
The body of an Israeli washed ashore in Sinai and was transferred to Israel on Friday night.
Mano Maritime cruise lines confirmed that an Israeli man went missing on one of its vessels three weeks ago, which he boarded in Haifa. Mano said it doesn’t know what happened to the man or if he vanished before or after the boat left Haifa, from where it set sail for Cyprus.
Mano added that they have no idea if the man in question is the same one who washed up in Sinai, despite media reports saying so. When asked about the reports, Israel Police did not confirm, only saying that the missing man set off on a private boat earlier this month for Cyprus when he disappeared.
The Egyptian authorities transferred the body to Israel via the Kerem Shalom crossing. The body was discovered three days ago on the beach at Sheikh Zuweid, an Egyptian Beduin town near the Gaza border in North Sinai.
The body was first transferred to a hospital in nearby El-Arish, where the Egyptian authorities undertook an autopsy examination, the Egyptian newspaper Al- Wafd reported.Al-Wafd cited an unnamed medical source from the El-Arish hospital who said that during the autopsy, medics found five gunshot wounds on the body.
The source said that the Israeli citizen’s death had occurred before the body had been thrown into the sea, but that it had been difficult to determine more information because the body had decomposed during its time in the water, according to Al-Wafd.
The source added that the postmortem at El-Arish indicated that the Israeli citizen had been dead for about five days.
The Egyptian source told Al- Wafd that the corpse had likely washed up onto the Egyptian beach but the murder occurred outside Egyptian territory, either in Israel or in Gaza. Egyptian prosecutors had therefore closed the file when they handed over the body to Israel, the source noted.