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"Prisoner X" Mordechai Keidar passed away at the age of 91
Kedar is suspected that in 1957, he murdered a Jewish contact who assisted him in his intelligence mission in Argentina.
For a year his family did not know he was imprisoned in Israel, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison, seven of them running in solitary confinement.
After his release he moved to the US and his requests for a retrial were denied
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Intel section
Eli Ashkenazi
Tuesday, 02 February 2021, 15:49
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"I was unwanted even before I was born, and after I was born no one wanted me."
Kedar (Photo: Official Website, Yossi Aloni)
Mordechai (Motle) Kedar, known as "Prisoner X", passed away today (Tuesday) in Los Angeles at the age of 91. Kedar was born in Vilnius (Vilna) in 1929.
His father left home when he was a baby and his mother could not raise him alone, when he was five he immigrated with his grandparents to Eretz Israel and lived with them in Hadera.
Kedar, who was a unit man in the intelligence department in the mid-1950s, is suspected that in March 1957, while on duty, while in Argentina, he murdered a Jewish contact who assisted him in his mission.
When he arrived in Israel, he was arrested, imprisoned and tried.
For more than a year, Kedar's family, who was married and the father of a child, did not know he was in prison in Israel and his son, Erez, who was four when his father was arrested, did not see him for 11 years.
Kedar was sentenced to 20 years in prison by a military tribunal.
The whole affair was completely overshadowed and his name was not even mentioned within the walls of the prison and he was defined as "Prisoner X".
For about four years he was placed under administrative detention.
For half a year he was placed in a dungeon and for about seven years was in an isolated cell.
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His son had not seen him for 11 years.
Kedar (Photo: Official Website, Yossi Aloni)
After a while, another prisoner whose name was banned from publication was housed in a cell next to it, and the neighborhood was called "the third person."
It was Avri Elad, also an Israeli intelligence official.
Elad is suspected of betraying the network of Jewish spies operating in Egypt in what became known as the "bad business."
During Kedar's arrest, two cases arose from his past as a citizen to which his name was linked - the murder of Yosef Lipsker, a taxi driver from Hadera, who was shot on the city's beach, and Kedar's participation in a sophisticated and daring bank robbery in Afula in 1951.
Three robbers dressed in paratroopers robbed a branch of the "Employees' Lending Fund" branch of money, amounting to ten thousand pounds.
The suspicions were known to the intelligence services when it was decided to recruit him as an agent operator, but they were ignored and it is possible that these acts even led to the recruitment of Kedar.
"I was unwanted even before I was born, and after I was born no one wanted me," he told former journalist Eli Tavor of this world.
In 1946, Kedar enlisted in the Plymouth and later was a mechanic in the Navy and during his service defected from the army.
Over the years, Kedar reiterated his innocence. He was released after 17 years in prison and moved to Los Angeles. Over the years he applied to the Israeli legal system. He will be tried again, but his requests were rejected by the Military Court of Appeals and by the High Court.
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