Assailant gets life for Jerusalem Gay Pride stabbing spree

An ultra-Orthodox Jewish man was sentenced to life imprisonment on Sunday for murdering a teenage girl at a Gay Pride parade in Jerusalem last year, an attack he carried out just weeks after serving a jail term for a similar attack a decade earlier.  

 

Yishai Schlissel said during his trial in a Jerusalem court that he had been doing God's will by killing a 16-year-old girl and wounding five other participants at the July 2015 event.   

 

At a gay pride parade in Jerusalem in 2005, Schlissel stabbed three people, all of whom survived. In 2007, he was sentenced to 12 years and subsequently released early, in June 2015, with the customary time off for good behaviour.    

 

Following his release from prison before last year's march, police were instructed to be on the lookout for Schlissel and bar him from the event. Seven police officers were reassigned and four formally reprimanded for failing to do so.   

 

In addition to his life sentence, the court tagged an additional 30 years onto his term for attempted murder, a Justice Ministry statement said.    

 

The Jerusalem parade has long been a focus of tension between Israel's predominantly secular majority and the ultra-Orthodox Jewish minority, who object to public displays of homosexuality.