Reported arrest in Israel turns spotlight on case of missing girl
New developments have thrust the case of a nine-year-old girl who vanished in Israel nearly two years ago back into the spotlight, after months eclipsed by the Gaza hostage crisis.
Haymanut Kasau's disappearance made headlines again from Wednesday after the reported but so far unconfirmed arrest of a suspect.
Kasau, who moved to Israel from Ethiopia in 2021, was last seen on February 25, 2024, near an integration centre for new immigrants in Safed in the north.
Police and volunteers searched the area in the weeks after she disappeared and again more recently, but with no result.
Television station Channel 12 this week reported the arrest of a suspect after a young girl of Ethiopian origin was assaulted in the southern Israeli city of Beersheba.
In a television interview in which her face was blurred, the 12-year-old said she knew the man who tried to attack her from her time at the Safed integration centre, where she had been acquainted with missing girl Haymanut Kasau.
A censorship order prohibits disclosing information about the details of the investigation, and police did not respond to an AFP request seeking confirmation of information published in the Israeli press.
The suspect's lawyer, Ran Alon, told Channel 12 that his client was "a person with no criminal record and leading a normal life", and that he could not say more because of the censorship order.
On December 1, during a parliamentary meeting on the Kasau case, the family asked the Shin Bet, Israel's domestic security agency, to take over the investigation and to classify her disappearance as an abduction.
The same day, National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir announced that he would ask the new head of the Shin Bet to consider responding to this request, which would provide greater resources to find her.
- 'Bermuda Triangle' -
"I can't take any more talk. The police may have carried out many searches, but the result is that there are still no clues pointing to where my daughter might be," the girl's father Tafsai Kasau said to members of parliament.
"The police did everything they could," district commander Avi Ayache responded.
"In my 26 years of service, I've never seen so much effort put in to find a missing person."
The family requested that the girl's photo be broadcast throughout the country "as the photos of the Gaza hostages were".
"I don't know if it's because of the colour of our skin, but we want to understand why we still don't have any answers," an aunt of the missing girl told the news site Ynet in November.
Local media and social networks have spoken of other mysterious disappearances in the Safed region, sometimes dubbed the "Israeli Bermuda Triangle".
In November, a police canine unit announced it was resuming searches there aimed at finding Kasau and also Moshe Eliezer Ilovitz, 37, who has been missing since May 2018.
Searches will also look for Moshe Kleinerman, 16, missing since March 2022, Rafael Haddad, 60, missing since November 2022, and 28-year-old David Israel Fedida, missing since October 2024.
"We're focusing our searches on caves, wells, thickets, and possible hiding places," the unit said in a statement.
When descendants of communities that remained cut off from other Jews for centuries were recognised by Israel's religious authorities, 80,000 Ethiopians, who identify as "Beta Israel", were flown to the country in 1984 and 1991 in two airlifts.
The Ethiopian Jewish community in Israel now numbers about 177,000 people, according to official statistics. Nearly 84,000 have been born in the country.
In recent years, members of the community have staged demonstrations to denounce racism and discrimination that they say they face in Israel.
