Israel's 'Prisoner X' was Australian Mossad agent, documentary claims

[Jan Klimkowski]

Nothing to see here.....

Because the Israeli Military Censor has slapped a National Security blackout on the story.

Israel's 'Prisoner X' was Australian Mossad agent, documentary claims

Israel has never acknowledged prisoner's existence and has gone to extraordinary lengths to stifle media coverage of case

Peter Beaumont
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 12 February 2013 14.01 GMT
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Ben Zygier
ABC claims 'Prisoner X', who is thought to have taken his own life in Ayalon prison in 2010, was Australian citizen Ben Zygier. Photograph: ABC TV

Like the fictional Man in the Iron Mask, Israel's infamous "Prisoner X" was allegedly held in solitary confinement in conditions of such strict secrecy that even his own jailors were told neither his name nor the crime he had allegedly committed.

The man's identity became the subject of intense speculation when he was reportedly found hanged in his cell in 2010, but the prisoner's existence has never been officially acknowledged by Israel's government which has gone to extraordinary lengths to stifle media coverage of the case.

Now, however, new evidence has been uncovered by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation strongly suggesting that Prisoner X was an Australian citizen and a Mossad agent.

In the immediate aftermath of ABC's claims, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that the Israeli prime minister's office had called "an emergency meeting of the Editors Committee … to ask its members to cooperate with the government and withhold publication of information pertaining to an incident that is very embarrassing to a certain government agency".

The meeting was widely believed to be linked to the Prisoner X case.

In a second article referring to the case of a "prisoner's suicide in 2010", the paper linked explicitly to its report on the gagging order.

A new documentary screened earlier this week for the ABC's Foreign Correspondent programme claims Prisoner X was Ben Zygier, who used the name Ben Alon or Ben Allen after moving to Israel. He was secretly imprisoned in Ayalon prison in Ramla in the wing built to accommodate Yigal Amir, the assassin of the Israeli president Yitzhak Rabin, ABC reported.

The 34-year old was married to an Israeli woman and was the father of two young children. He had reportedly spent a number of months in the Prisoner X cell before his death.

The infamous case first came to international attention amid a flurry of stories in 2010. Coverage talked about the existence of an identified man being held in conditions of absolute secrecy for an undisclosed crime which prompted a media guessing game over his identity, with some speculating he was an Iranian Revolutionary Guards general.

According to accounts at the time, even his guards were not aware of the prisoner's identity or the crime he had allegedly committed.

Debate over the existence of Prisoner X was, however, shortlived with the story disappearing from the Haaretz website.

Speculation that the Israeli government had imposed a media blackout prompted Dan Yakir, the chief legal counsel with the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, to write to the country's attorney general and demand that the "blackout be eliminated" on the arrest.

Yesterday Haaretz printed a heavily pixilated image of what it said was the original document enforcing a reporting ban.

The existence of the blackout appeared to be confirmed by the call for a reporting ban in the immediate aftermath of the Australian report.

According to the ABC investigation, circumstantial evidence for its identification of Zygier was provided by the repatriation of his body to Melbourne from Tel Aviv a week after Prisoner X was allegedly found hanged in his cell.

The programme claimed that Zygier had a second passport in the name of Ben Allen at the time of the repatriation of his body.

Commenting on ABC's disclosures, the Australian foreign minister, Bob Carr, said he was concerned by the claims. "Those allegations certainly do trouble me," he said.

"It's never been raised with me. I'm not reluctant to seek an explanation from the Israeli government about what happened to Mr Allen and about what their view of it is. The difficulty is I'm advised we've had no contact with his family [and] there's been no request for consular assistance during the period it's alleged he was in prison.

"Even if Prisoner X has now been identified, his crime, however, remains a mystery although it has been widely speculated that it would have involved treachery to warrant such extreme measures."