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Who stabbed Tair? The murder mystery that has gripped Israel

The slaying of a 13-year-old girl killed in 2006 became a national obsession - now a documentary about the case is coming to the UK

July 27, 2023 13:15
Tair 17
4 min read

One December afternoon in 2006, Tair Rada failed to come home from school. The normally diligent 13-year-old Israeli girl had skipped her final lesson of the day and was due to go to a dance class that evening. As time went on and she failed to appear, however, her mother Ilana began to panic.

At 7pm Tair’s body was found inside a locked bathroom stall at her school in the Golan Heights. Her throat had been slit, her body had several wounds, and the seat and floor were covered with her blood.

For several days afterwards, Ilana Rada says, she could not accept that her daughter had been killed.

“I was convinced that Tair was going to step in through the door any moment and that it was just false news, and that she’s OK,” she tells the JC.

“But that didn’t happen.”

Within days the police had arrested Roman Zdorov, a skinny Ukrainian immigrant in his late twenties with a poor grasp of Hebrew who worked as a maintenance man at Tair’s school.

He soon confessed to the killing before re-enacting it for investigators and providing a motive: Tair had mocked him after he declined her request for a cigarette.

Thanks to this admission, Zdorov was sentenced to life in prison. The evidence, judges said in a 450-page verdict, “left no doubt” of his guilt. But in March this year, 17 years after the murder, he was acquitted of any guilt.

A case that became a national obsession in Israel and then a cause célèbre had collapsed into farce, with Ilana left no closer to knowing who killed her daughter.

Next week, Shadow of Truth — a four-part Israeli documentary series that did much to clear Zdorov — is due to premiere on British television, with a new fifth episode covering Zdorov’s acquittal.

The moment he was finally cleared, Zdorov says, made him feel “like a bomb went off”.

“I gave all I had to [prove] my innocence in this case and spent so much time on it and finally I could be reunited with my family and be a free man.”

He insists that when he was first arrested, he was anxious to cooperate with the police because he knew he was innocent.

“I was trying to help the police as much as I could,” he claims, “and suddenly they were accusing me and I didn’t understand why they were trying to pin this murder on me of all people.

“I kept asking myself that, and I couldn’t find an answer.”

Held in police custody, Zdorov found solace talking to his Russian-speaking cellmate, Artur. Over the course of several days he discussed the case with him and sought his advice.