‘Sex slave’ learns to shoot

A CHABAD-LUBAVITCH woman who withdrew her allegation that she spent ten years being held as a sex slave in Brooklyn, New York, is now learning how to shoot an Uzi in Israel.

In one of a series of photos posted online, the flaming redhead can be seen holding a pistol. She also appears on top of a tank, practising the martial art Krav Maga and firing a sub-machine gun.

The head of a sex crimes unit in New York recently resigned over the woman’s case, in which four black men were alleged to have forced her into sex slavery for almost a decade, beginning when she was just 13.

Lauren Hersh, 36, who prosecuted the four men, admitted that she had allowed the men to stay in jail for a year before informing their defence attorneys that the accuser had recanted her accusations just a day after making them. Ms Hirsh left her post on May 24 under a cloud of suspicion that her office had suppressed this evidence.

Two of the defendants, Darrell Dula and Damien Crooks, were released in April, while Jamali Brockett and his brother Jawara remain in custody on unrelated charges.

The case has raised the spectre of reopening long-festering wounds between the black and Jewish communities in Crown Heights. The area was the site of a three-day riot in 1991, touched off by an incident in which a black boy, Gavin Cato, was accidentally run over and killed by a car in Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson’s motorcade.