A murder suspect has committed suicide in a Jerusalem prison cell while awaiting extradition to the United States. The suspect, a 62-year-old Israeli doctor, who was set to be handed over to the US for murder and fraud charges, was being held in a cell with eight other detainees.
Early on Sunday morning, he cut open an artery in his foot at the Russian Compound detention center. His death was determined at the scene, after medics failed failed to revive him.
The man was arrested two months ago at Ben-Gurion Airport was in the United States for the past six years for allegedly committing two murders in 2002 and 2004 and fraud offenses. He was jailed with eight other detainees.
Prisoners in the Russian Compound heard grunts from the suspect's bed early on Sunday morning and noticed that he was bleeding. They called the guards, but even the Magen David Adom teams that were called to the scene couldn't save him.
Initial examinations revealed that he cut his arteries using a razor. As in any suicide case, the Israel Prison Service launched an investigation and reported the incident to the police.
This is the first detainee to commit suicide in 2011, following 12 detainee and prisoner suicides in Prison Service facilities in 2010. The Prison service stated that the man was not considered suicidal and so, was not under constant supervision.
The man was accused of murdering two women by injecting them with unidentifiable substances. In one case, he collected over $1,000,000 from insurance companies. He escaped from the US in 2005 and never returned over fears that he would be arrested.
US authorities suspected that he was in contact with an American woman who had emigrated from Russia and together they worked to issue life insurance policies worth $1 million each - in her name. The two supplied the insurance companies with false details and hid the existence of the other policies from each company.
In November 2002, two years after the policies were issued; it is suspected that he murdered the woman, 47, by injecting her with substances that were unidentifiable in the post mortem autopsy.
At the same time, he used a similar system with another woman, 51, also a Russian immigrant. According to the accusations, he killed her using the same method in August 2004, but in this case was unable to collect on the insurance policy.