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 jailers 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 that strongly suggests Prisoner X was an Australian citizen, Ben Zygier, whom it described a Mossad agent.
Although there has been no intimation of the accusations against Zygier, commentators have suggested it could only suggest the most serious kind of security case, perhaps involving treason.
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 co-operate with the government and withhold publication of information pertaining to an incident that is very embarrassing to a certain government agency”.
Later in the day the gagging orders were explicitly linked to the claims about the dead Australian by several Israeli MPs who also raised questions about the affair during a debate in the Knesset.
Asked by an Arab MP about “reports [of the suicide of] an Australian citizen who was in Israeli custody under a different identity”, the justice minister, Yaakov Ne’eman, replied: “I cannot answer these questions because the matter does not fall under the authority of the justice minister. But there is no doubt that if true, the matter must be looked into.”
A second MP, Dov Henin, asked: “Are there people in prisons whose incarceration is kept secret? What are the supervision mechanisms on this kind of imprisonment? What are the possibilities for parliamentary supervision on such incarcerations? How can the public be critical in this situation?”
A new documentary screened this week for ABC’s Foreign Correspondent programme claims Zygier 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 prime minister 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 cell before his death.
Zygier’s father Geoffrey, a prominent leader of the Melbourne Jewish community, apparently refused to speak to the programme makers.
The only comparable case that has come to light was Israel’s secret imprisonment for more than 10 years of the KGB spy Marcus Klingberg after he was tried under a false identity.
Full story, with links, The Guardian here
• ABC: Veil of secrecy; includes links to the original program on iview
