Philoumenos is said by investigators to have been fleeing the explosion and fire caused by the grenade when he was pursued by Raby and hit multiple times with an axe.
Raby was arrested on 17 November 1982 as he again attempted enter the Monastery at Jacob's Well illicitly by climbing over a wall; he was carrying hand grenades.
[8] Raby, a newly religious Jew,[9] was described as unwashed, dressed in worn-out clothing, and audibly muttered passages of scripture in a strange manner.
"[10] Initial accounts depicted the murder as an anti-Christian hate attack carried out by a group of Jewish settlers, the result being what Maariv described as "a wave of hatred" in Greece.
Reports indicating that "radical Jews" had tortured Philoumenos and "cut off the fingers of his hand" before killing him had appeared in Greek newspapers.
[7] In a 2017 article in the journal Israel Studies, researchers David Gurevich and Yisca Harani found that false accounts blaming the slaying on "settlers" and "Zionist extremists" persisted even after the arrest of the assailant and his confinement in a mental institution, and that there were "patterns of ritual murder accusation in the popular narrative."
[1] The "careful" wording of the pronouncement of the Jerusalem Patriarchate that canonized Philoumenos makes no mention of murderer's faith or ethnicity; he is described as a "vile man", a "heterodox fanatic visitor" and, inaccurately, as an individual who "with an axe, opened a deep cut across his forehead, cut off the fingers of his right hand, and upon escaping threw a grenade which ended the Father's life.
[4][5] Troparion (Tone 3) Troparion (Tone 4) Apolytikion Τῆς Ὀρούντης τὸν γόνον, νήσου Κύπρου τὸ βλάστημα, καὶ ἱερομάρτυρα νέον Ἰακὼβ θείου Φρέατος, Φιλούμενον, τιμήσωμεν, πιστοί, ὡς πρόμαχον τῆς πίστεως ἡμῶν, καὶ ἀήττητον ὁπλίτην Χριστοῦ τῆς ἀληθείας πόθῳ κράζοντες· Δόξα τῷ σὲ δοξάσαντι Χριστῷ, δόξα τῷ σὲ ἀφθαρτίσαντι, δόξα τῷ σὲ ἡμῖν χειραγωγὸν πρὸς πόλον δείξαντι.