Women stabbed in Israel

Tour guide Kaye Wilson said the pair were attacked by two Arab men in a forest just outside Jerusalem. Her companion, Kristine Luken, was killed – but she managed to escape and raised the alarm. The women had been walking close to archaeological sites – around Beit Shemesh, west of Jerusalem.

They were close to the village of Mata – not far from the main road when they were attacked. Kaye Wilson managed to get to a small car park and alert a family. Her hands were still tied behind her back.

The body of Christine Logan was found a few hundred yards away.

The police are searching door to door and believe that the two men might have hidden in one of the several Palestinian villages nearby.

Israeli troops have also entered a hospital in the nearby West Bank town of Beit Jala to check the men weren’t pretending to be patients.

An Israeli police official has told Channel 4 News he believes the crime was political and “nationalistic” – a phrase used by Israelis to describe an attack by Palestinian militants.

She told Israeli newspaper Haaretz she and her companion had been sitting down, just off the hiking trail, when the two men approached and asked them in Hebrew if they had any water.

She tried to get them to leave, she said, feeling that “something wasn’t right”, and the two women then headed back towards the trail.

“Suddenly I noticed them,” she went on. “It all happened so fast. They came and attacked us.”

One of the men whipped out a long knife, which looked like a bread knife with a serrated edge, she said.

“I was scared but my friend became hysterical. I told her in English to be quiet and not make noise,” she said.

But the men then began to stab both women.

“I had a Star of David hanging on a chain around my neck. He took it off like a gentleman and then turned me around and stabbed in the place where the Star of David had been,” she said.

It was clear that the two men had come to kill, she added, questioning why they would have been carrying such a knife otherwise.