Three Jewish Israelis face charges for abducting and murdering a Palestinian teenager in a revenge attack for the killing of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank.
In a statement on Monday, police said three of the six suspects arrested a week ago had admitted kidnapping Mohammed Abu Khdeir, 16, from outside his house in Shuafat, East Jerusalem, on 2 July, taking him to a secluded forest and burning him alive.
The 29-year-old man and two 17-year-olds appeared before Petah Tikva magistrates court in Jerusalem on Monday and were ordered to be held until Friday. The police said the men had admitted "a racist, nationalist motive", and had carried out the attack in response to the killing of Eyal Yifrach, 19, and Gil-ad Sha'er and Naftali Frankel, both 16, whose bodies were discovered on 30 June in a shallow grave near Hebron.
"[The] three suspects admitted to the charges and reconstructed the events. They noted that the acts were carried out against the kidnapping and killing of three Jewish boys," the police statement said.
Three other men who were arrested in the wake of the murder, which led to some of the most violent street riots in East Jerusalem and northern Israel for a decade last week, knew about the killing but did not take part and have been released. They are under house arrest and remain under investigation.
It was revealed on Monday that one of the three had Abu Khdeir's mobile phone in his house when he was arrested, and that the investigation that located the car the gang had used to carry out the kidnapping did not use CCTV footage that was gathered by Shuafat residents on the night of the murder.
In the wake of the incident, many residents in Shuafat said they had had CCTV footage capturing the abduction, but it had been confiscated by police officers. Israeli police said on Monday that the videos identified neither the killers nor the licence plate of the car.
It was also revealed that the gang had tried to abduct another Arab boy the night before the murder in the nearby neighbourhood of Beit Hanina.
Many of the facts from the official police investigation had been subject to a gagging order until Monday – a common practice for controversial court cases in Israel. The names of the three men have not yet been revealed and many of the facts of the case remain confidential.
Monday's police statement revealed for the first time the timeline of what occurred on the night of 2 July, a day after the funeral of the three murdered Israelis, whose killers are still at large. Israel has accused Hamas of being responsible for their deaths.
"On 2 July the three suspects made ​​a group decision to kidnap and murder an Arab," police said.
The gang searched several Arab neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem before arriving in Shuafat, where they saw Abu Khdeir sitting outside his house.
They approached the boy, who was waiting for dawn Ramadan prayers to begin, and forced him into the car. They beat him up while in the vehicle and when they arrived in a deserted area of forest near Jerusalem, they poured gasoline over him and set him on fire. His charred remains were found the following day.
Israeli media reported on Monday that an associate of the three men had said they were intending to plead insanity. A source told Haaretz that the two 17-year-olds "live at the fringe of society and aren't functioning individuals".
The potential insanity plea has long been expected by Abu Khdeir's family in Shuafat. His father, Hussein, told the Guardian on Friday that he did not believe he would ever receive justice for the death of his son.
"From the very first day of the investigation I said that they will either say that the killers are crazy, or they will set them free," he said outside the family home in Shuafat.
The murder of Abu Khdeir sparked a week of riots in East Jerusalem, during which dozens of Palestinians were injured in clashes with soldiers outside the family home. During the protests, Shuafat residents burned the nearby station of the Jerusalem Light Railway and fought soldiers, who responded with rubber bullets and teargas.