Boaz Clashes with Police in Ophira and Escapes Detention

Boaz Brandstetter’s clash with police in Ophira turns a dispute over an arrest into an escape and a second disappearance. Recounted in an investigator’s report to Manfred M. Zakheim, the episode also exposes how little the authorities know of Boaz’s movements: while police search the desert, an investigator traces him to a religious group near Hebron, only for him to vanish again.

The arrest at Ophira

During the night of June 10 to 11, a tour boat on which Boaz had recently been working was stolen from the civilian anchorage at Ophira. At two in the morning it was found abandoned near Ras Muhammad, apparently after being used by Bedouin smugglers to carry hashish from the Egyptian coast. A patrol pursued the smugglers, and at five, at dawn, a young Bedouin named Hamed Mutani was arrested. He had been living with Boaz at a gas station, along with three young women from abroad.

The report gives competing accounts of the arrest. Hamed denied resisting, while the investigator believed that police and military personnel had beaten him; they denied doing so. Boaz became involved and, using a tire attached to a rope, injured nine soldiers and five members of the Ophira police force before being overpowered. He was arrested on a charge of obstructing a lawful arrest. In his statement at the police station, he maintained that the arresting officers had used violence against Hamed and that both men had acted in self-defense. Hamed was released after several hours, when interrogators concluded that he had played no part in either the boat theft or the smuggling.

Escape and search

Less than twenty-four hours after his arrest, during the night of June 11 to 12, Boaz escaped by breaking through the wall of the prefabricated structure that housed the police station. The officer on duty believed he was still wandering in the desert and might have taken shelter with Hamed, so the Ophira police continued their search in that direction.

That expectation proved wrong. Albert Maimon, an investigator working for S. Zand Private Investigations Ltd., pursued a different lead and quickly found that Boaz had stayed until two days earlier in a rented apartment in Kiryat Arba, near Hebron. The apartment was occupied by five unmarried religious men of American and Russian origins, attached to a small right-wing organization calling itself Jewish Fellowship. The report also notes that Michel-Henri Sommo was associated with the same cause.

A brief discovery

The investigators communicated Boaz’s whereabouts to the police in accordance with their legal responsibility. By then, however, he had disappeared from the apartment. The report ends without establishing where he went next: the desert search had been based on a mistaken assumption, and the discovery in Kiryat Arba yielded only a recent trace of him. Zand’s account therefore records both the limits of the search and the speed with which Boaz could move beyond it.