Colonel's Killers Planned to Abduct his Wife

by Gil Ronen

The Arab terrorists who murdered reserve colonel Sraya Ofer Hy”d at his home on October 10, also planned to abduct his wife, Monique. She succeded in escaping, however, suffering injury in the process.

Ouda Haroub, 18, and Bashir Haroub, 21, both from the PA Arab town of Deir Sammit in the Hevron region, were charged this week with murdering  Ofer, whose nickname was Yaya, outside his Jordan Valley home.

According to the charge sheets filed against them at the Shomron (Samaria) military court, the terrorists began planning the murder about six months before they carried it out.


hey beat and stabbed the former senior IDF officer until he died. They then looked for Monique, in order to abduct her. When they failed to find her, they escaped with the help of a third terrorist, Abed Shuamra, whom they called after the murder. Shuamra was charged last week.

The terrorists initially said that they had come to commit a robbery, but things “got out of hand.” This turned out to be untrue, and investigators determined that the murder was pre-planned.

Monique Ofer said after the murder that she and her husband heard a noise outside their home and, upon going outside to check it out, her husband was attacked by Arabs wielding iron bars and axes. The two attackers tried to grab her as she fled from the scene, but she managed to escape and stopped a passing car on Route 90 to call security forces.

"I received a call from a woman who said she (and her husband) were attacked inside their home and she managed to run away and stop a passing car for help," a paramedic working the Magen David Adom call center said. "I immediately sent medics in the area to the scene and contacted the security forces."

It later turned out that Sraya Ofer had encountered his murderers two weeks before the murder, when they approached his home. They aroused his suspicion in that encounter and he reported the license number of their car to police.

When the two killers came near his home for the first time, Ofer approached them with his gun in his hand, and with his dog next to him. The two told him that they were on their way north in their car, which had overheated, and asked for water for the car's cooling system.

Ofer gave them water but suspected that they were lying, and followed them as they returned to their car. He noticed that they headed south, and not north as they had told him. He called the police's hotline number, 100, and reported the vehicle's license plate number.

Following the report, a police car came to his home at Brosh Habik'a, and a professional tracker was also summoned when the doors of two vacation homes were found to be open, raising suspicion of a break-in.

There were no signs of a break-in, however, and a police check of the car's license plate number found that it had not been stolen. Police therefore decided not to pursue the matter further.