Stabbed US tourist's body found near Jerusalem

A friend of the slain woman survived, despite being knifed several times, and said the assailants at one point carefully removed her Star of David necklace and then stabbed her in the place it had rested on her chest.

Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld identified the slain woman as Christine Logan. He said she was American and 40 years old but did not have her hometown.
The friend, Kaye Susan Wilson, a naturalised Israeli citizen originally from Britain, has been hospitalised with light wounds, officials said.

With a massive manhunt under way for the assailants, Rosenfeld said "the main lead line is that the attack was nationalistic, but we haven't ruled out the possibility that it was criminal."

Police said there were no signs that Wilson had been sexually assaulted or robbed.
Wilson told Israeli media that two Arab men approached her and Logan as they rested during a hike in the hills outside Jerusalem.

She said the men asked them for water, and then she and her friend walked away. Thinking the men had left, the women headed back to the main trail when suddenly they were attacked.

"It all happened so fast. They came and attacked us," Wilson, 46, told reporters.
She said one of the men took out a knife that looked "like a bread knife with a serrated edge." Logan then "became hysterical" and the men began to stab them, Wilson said.
"It was clear that they came to kill," she added. "Who carries around a knife like that?"
At one point, Wilson said one of the assailants gently took a Star of David chain off her neck, "then turned me around and stabbed in the place where the Star of David had been."

Wilson said she pretended to be dead, even as she could hear her friend dying. She said she waited for two minutes, then made her way back to a parking lot several hundred yards away where she found help.

After Wilson reported the incident, police and paramedics launched a large-scale hunt and located Logan's body early today buried under some bushes, about 20 yards from where the attack was believed to have occurred. The site is inside Israel, not far from the frontier with the West Bank.