The intelligence man died at his home in Los Angeles at the age of 91 • He was convicted of the murder of a Jewish assistant in Argentina and sentenced to 20 years in prison • His fight for a retrial was unsuccessful
Mordechai Keidar
Photography:
Yossi Aloni - Archive
The criminal and intelligence man Mordechai Keidar passed away today (Tuesday) at the age of 91, at his home in Los Angeles.
This brings to an end one of the most complex and unresolved issues in the history of Israeli intelligence.
Kedar was born in Vilnius (Vilna) in 1929 and immigrated to Israel in 1934. He later attended the Haifa Naval School and served in the Plymouth during the War of Independence. The robbers in the jeep that was waiting for them outside.
The sophisticated robbery took place a year after a taxi driver was murdered on the beach of Hadera, when there were rumors linking Kisher to the murder.
Despite this, after the bad business affair in Egypt, Israel's intelligence services recruited Kedar to operate a new spy network in the country.
Thus in 1957 Kedar was drafted into the 188th Intelligence Unit which operated agents.
The reason for his enlistment was the thought that a sophisticated and accomplished man like Kedar would be happy to serve the country and also clear his name in the process.
In practice, the plot became complicated when the body of a member of the community named Kalman Klein, who was an Israeli intelligence aide in introducing agents to the Arab community that was active in the country and maintained close contact with Arab countries, was found in a hiding place in Argentina.
The person who was supposed to meet Kalman Klein and receive a sum of $ 15,000 from him was Kedar, who disappeared after the affair.
At this point, Kedar contacted the intelligence services and claimed his innocence, but was tempted to come to Israel.
He was imprisoned without trial and later managed to contact Dr. David Rudy, the psychologist in the intelligence department, who also enlisted him in the IDF.
The person who defended Kedar in the secret trial was Adv. Shmuel Tamir, who later became Israel's Minister of Justice. The military court that heard the case convicted Kedar of robbery and murder and sentenced him to 20 years in prison, even though Kedar claimed he was indicted and did not murder Klein. To this day there is confidentiality about the trial and the evidence given in it. Kedar was called Prisoner X for many years.
Years later, in 1995, Kedar, on his own initiative, applied to the Israeli law enforcement authorities for a retrial, claiming his innocence.
As evidence of this, he cited the fact that the case in his case from 1957 disappeared and noted that he was a victim of struggles within the Israeli intelligence community in the early years of the state.
After a long struggle on January 15, 2001, it was decided that the president of the Tel Aviv District Court, Uri Goren, would consider Kedar's request as part of a reserve service in which he was awarded the rank of major general.
The complex trial was conducted and it was argued that in accordance with the time of death set for Klein, Kedar had an alibi.
The military prosecutor, on the other hand, argued that the doctor in Argentina could not, in the circumstances of the case, determine the time of death, sought to dismiss the appeal and argued that it had been a long time since the request for a retrial, which Kedar had declared as early as 1975. Retrial.
Kedar appealed against the decision to the High Court, but High Court judges in 2004 did not intervene in the military court's considerations.
It is important to note that until his last day, Kedar claimed his innocence and noted that if he had committed the murder he would have lifted the body.
His associates also claim that he was wronged.
However, the affair will likely remain open forever, due to the loss of material from those days and a restraining order on other materials.
