'Ushrenko murder reminiscent of mafia methods'

The gruesome murder of the Ushrenko family on Saturday, including three-year-old Revital and four-month-old Netanel, was a particularly horrifying and unprecedented case for police investigators in Israel.

The case, however, did not come as a complete surprise to Baruch Ben Neria, former Israeli ambassador to Georgia and Armenia, who told Ynet of similar methods employed in the Caucasus region.

"It's a way of settling scores. It seems there are two basic scenarios that could lead to a murder of this nature," Ben Neria said, who also engaged in crime solving in his past.

"One possibility is that it was a vendetta-type murder. It's a tradition in the Caucasus and central Asian countries, part of a behavioral code. The background in this type of case is a 'family honor' violation, insult or humiliation. Money can also be involved together with the family issue."

The second possibility Ben Neria raised is settling scores on a criminal-financial background. "There were cases in which a crime organization hired a hit man to kill not only a debtor but his entire milieu – mainly first degree relatives.

"This type of murder is very symbolic. A means to warn off future generations. Murdering children is performed in order to show how serious the crime organization is, to show that it is the one that sets the rules, and the reason doesn't have to be a financial debt, it could also be a type of conduct the organization doesn't approve."

6 caskets in one funeral (Photo: Avi Moalem)

Ben Neria, who acted as ambassador between 1996 and 1999, stressed that the message in these types of crimes is to lay fear and terrorize anyone who doesn’t follow the crime organization's codes. The former ambassador further noted that using a knife instead of a gun, followed by arson, is also symbolic to showing no mercy.

Crime groups making aliyah in 90's

Rumors about a Caucasus mafia are being speculated regarding the perpetrators of such crimes, however Ben Neria claimed that it is a very broad term. "In terms of criminology there is such a term which refers to the organization's country of origin. But in the Caucasus there are 50 peoples and nationalities. There are crime organizations that rose on the ruins of the former Soviet Union," he said.

Ben Neria, as someone who is familiar with the issues, emphasized the significance of the arrival of members of crime organizations to Israel with the immigrations waves of the early 1990s. "Senior and junior crime bosses used marriages, sometimes fictitious, and other false documents to settle down here.

"It was a new phenomenon and the police took a while to crack it. The law against membership in crime organizations was legislated only a number of years ago and until then the police battled it out with no real means," the former ambassador said.

Some of the crime organizations are still currently active. "In the last decade there is a merging of various mafias, they succeeded in turning themselves into businessmen and their old tactics changed. There are collaborations between Israeli crime groups and overseas organizations that control their activities," Ben Neria stated.