The Emirati authorities announced Monday, November 25, that they had identified the assassins of Zvi Kogan, an Israeli-Moldovan rabbi found dead two days earlier in the United Arab Emirates, where he resided.
The perpetrators of the crime, arrested the day before, would be Olimpi Tohirovic (28 years old), Mahmoud John Abdel Rahim (28 years old) and Azizi Kamilovic (33 years old). “All three of them are of Uzbek nationality,” indicates the Dubai daily Newspaper, who adds that “speed” of police work is a guarantee of the capabilities of the Emirates to “address all attempts intended to disrupt security and stability” of the country.
Zvi Kogan had been missing since Thursday, and his abandoned car was found an hour from his home in Abu Dhabi. Aged 28, he moved to the United Arab Emirates in 2020, the year of the signing of the agreements to normalize relations between the Emirates and Israel, known as the Abraham Accords, specifies the Lebanese daily The Orient-The Day.
He officiated there as an emissary of “Chabad-Lubavitch, an ultra-Orthodox Hasidic movement driven by a global missionary commitment to strengthening Jewish identity,” in this case expatriates of Jewish origin living in the Emirates, whose number is estimated between 500 and 3,000 people.
For this purpose, Zvi Kogan was notably able to open a kosher supermarket in downtown Dubai, explains further. L'Orient-Le Jour.
Emirati authorities discreet
The UAE authorities do not mention “the Israeli nationality of the victim, but only speak of him as a Moldovan”, notes the British daily The Guardian. For Abu Dhabi, it could be a matter of disconnecting this crime, as much as possible, from possible criticism of its regional diplomacy, the most favorable to Israel among the countries in the region.
The power in place also very quickly put forward the hypothesis of an operation by the Iranian secret services, intended to destabilize the United Arab Emirates, again as if to distance this crime from Emirati society.
This contrasts with the reactions of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for whom this is not a hybrid war operation, but a “despicable anti-Semitic terrorist attack”, reports the Israeli daily Haaretz.
Israel also recalled having advised its citizens last year to“avoid non-essential travel” in the Emirates, and for those who go there not to identify themselves as Israeli and not to go to places “associated with Israel and the Jewish community”, indicates for its part The New York Times.
