BETHLEHEM (Ma’an) – A Palestinian man from Bethlehem district in the southern West Bank has admitted to killing his own father and hiding his body in a forest beyond the Green Line, officials said Saturday.

Head of the Bethlehem general prosecution office Alaa Tamimi told Ma’an that a 28-year-old man from the village of Husan to the west of Bethlehem was detained for questioning after his 47-year-old father disappeared four days ago.

During interrogation, he added, the son admitted that he stabbed his father to death inside a residential building in the village. Then he took the body in a private car and hid it in a forest about four kilometers beyond the Green Line in Israel. Tamimi added that detectives and prosecutors searched the forest and found the father’s body lying on the ground.

Bethlehem district attorney Muhammad Hmeidan examined the body before he ordered transferring it to the public hospital in Bethlehem, then to the Institute of Forensic Medicine at Al-Quds University in Abu Dis.

Neither the suspect nor his alleged victim were identified.