The Abu Dhabi Federal Court of Appeals has sentenced three Uzbek men to death for the kidnapping and murder of Israeli-Moldovan soldier/rabbi Zvi Kogan, and handed life imprisonment to a fourth man.
Attorney Gen. Dr. Hamad Saif Al Shamsi had ordered the four defendants to be brought to a swift trial in January 2025, following investigations conducted by state prosecutors, which revealed that the defendants had tracked and murdered Kogan.
Alimbay Tahirovich, 28; Mahmudcan Abdurrahim, also aged 28, and Azizbek Kamilovich, 33, were taken into custody and extradited to the UAE from Turkiye.
Evidence presented to the court included the defendants’ detailed confessions to the crimes of murder and kidnapping, along with forensic reports, post-mortem examination findings, details of the instruments used in the crime, and witness testimonies.
The court unanimously sentenced the three defendants who carried out the murder and kidnapping to death, while the accomplice who aided them received a life sentence followed by deportation from the country after serving his sentence.
Under UAE law, sentences of capital punishment are automatically subject to appeal and are referred to the criminal division of the Federal Supreme Court for review and adjudication.
In November 2024, the suspects in Kogan’s murder in the UAE were apprehended in Türkiye through a joint operation by Turkish intelligence and law enforcement, according to sources.
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The sources said the Uzbek nationals were apprehended in Istanbul at the request of the UAE government after being found to be involved in the killing of the Israeli rabbi, who had been running a kosher supermarket chain in Dubai.
The suspects were taken into custody and extradited to the UAE.
Zvi Kogan was an Israeli-Moldovan rabbi who was abducted and killed in the United Arab Emirates on November 21, 2024.
Born in 1996 in Jerusalem, he was raised in a Litvak-Haredi family and pursued religious studies at various yeshivas in Israel.
Before moving to the UAE, he served in the Israel Defense Forces’ 84th “Givati” Infantry Brigade.
Kogan held dual citizenship of Israel and Moldova and lived in the UAE with his wife, Rivky (née Spielman), a U.S. citizen, whom he married in 2022.
In the UAE, Kogan worked to expand Jewish life as part of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, managing a kosher supermarket in Dubai and contributing to milestones like the establishment of the first Jewish education centre in the Gulf.
His efforts followed the normalisation of Israel-UAE relations under the 2020 Abraham Accords.
On November 24, 2024, his body was discovered in Al Ain, a city near the UAE-Oman border, after an intensive investigation involving UAE authorities and Israel’s Mossad. Israel labeled his killing an “antisemitic act of terror.”
