Israel on Monday held a farewell ceremony for an Israeli rabbi killed in the United Arab Emirates, after Emirati authorities said three suspects from Uzbekistan were in custody over his murder.
Tzvi Kogan, a 28-year-old UAE-based rabbi, was found dead by security services last week.
Neither Emirati nor Israeli officials have provided any details about the circumstances of Kogan’s murder.
“How can you already be gone?” his father, Alexander Kogan said during the ceremony in Kfar Chabad, a religious settlement in Israel belonging to the ultra-Orthodox Chabad-Lubavitch movement that Kogan was a part of.
Kogan’s body was brought to Israel earlier Monday for his funeral in Kfar Chabad.Â
Kogan was expected to be buried around 11:00 pm (2100 GMT) at the Mount of Olives in Israeli-occupied east Jerusalem.
The United Arab Emirates signed a US-brokered agreement normalising ties with Israel in 2020, known as the Abraham Accords.
Prior to Kogan’s death, the small Jewish and Israeli communities in the Muslim-majority UAE have kept a lower profile since the outbreak of the brutal war in Gaza in October 2023.
Israel, US react to Kogan’s murder
The three suspects were arrested on Sunday, and after “preliminary investigations” the interior ministry identified them in a statement.
“The authorities revealed the identities of the three perpetrators, all of whom are Uzbek nationals,” said the statement published on Monday by the official WAM news agency.
It named them as Olimboy Tohirovich, 28, Makhmudjon Abdurakhim, 28, and Azizbek Kamilovich, 33.
The ministry said authorities were taking “the necessary actions to uncover the details, circumstances and motives of the crime”.
Kogan was in the UAE as a representative of the Chabad Hasidic movement, which is known for its outreach efforts worldwide.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday condemned “the murder of an Israeli citizen and a Chabad emissary”, calling it “an abhorrent anti-Semitic terrorist attack”.
In Washington, the White House urged accountability for the “horrific crime”.
Israel travel warning
In 2020, the year Israel normalised relations with the UAE, Bahrain and Morocco, Kogan joined his older brother Reuven and a team of rabbis in the UAE, according to the Chabad-Lubavitch movement.
Chabad said on its website Kogan had managed a kosher supermarket in Dubai, which according to news agency AFP said was closed Monday with its window blinds down.
There is no figure for the number of Jews in the UAE, but an Israeli official has told AFP there were about 2,000 Israelis in the Gulf country, with the Jewish community estimated to be up to twice that figure.
The oil-rich Gulf state, whose population is made up mainly of expatriates, opened its first official synagogue within an interfaith centre in its capital Abu Dhabi last year to cater to the small but active Jewish community that had previously prayed in private.
Israel renewed a warning for Israelis to avoid any non-essential travel to the UAE and advised citizens already there to take extra precautions.
