Israel – Uproar Over Secret Mystery Prisoner

Israel – Outcry over the identity of a mysterious prisoner being held for unspecified crimes in the maximum security Ayalon jail. Dubbed ”Mister X” by the Hebrew language news website Y-net, which first reported on the case last week, the man’s identity has even been kept from his prison guards.

A measure of the severity of the crimes for which the man in being held is the fact that he is in the cell that was built specifically for Yigal Amir, the assassin of former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin.

His wing is cut off from the rest of the prison by double iron doors. Other prisoners can neither see nor hear him.

According to Y-net, only a select few in the government know who the man is and what charges he is being jailed for. Nobody talks to him, nobody sees him, nobody visits him, nobody knows he is in jail.

”He was placed in full and complete separation from the outside world,” said one Israel Prison Service official quoted by Y-net.

”There is confidentiality surrounding the detainee in wing 15 in every respect, including his identity and the crimes he committed.

”I doubt even the jailers in charge of him know who he is. It is scary that in 2010 a man is imprisoned in Israel without us even knowing who he is,” the prison source was quoted as saying.

”It is simply a person without a name and without an identity who was placed in complete and absolute isolation from the outside world. We don’t know if anybody even knows he is in jail.”

An Israeli Prisons Service spokesman declined to comment on the case, saying that for security, the agency did not provide information about any prisoner.

Several blog websites have suggested that this may indicate the man is being held on suspicion of espionage and that he may be a serving agent of Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service.

The story was quickly removed from the Y-net website after publication, and it was speculated to have been subjected to a gag order imposed by one of Israel’s security services.

No mention of the case has been made by any other Israeli news service. But the case has since attracted the attention of the prominent Israeli human rights group, the Association for Civil Rights, which has written to the Attorney-General protesting against the strict secrecy surrounding the jailing.

In the letter, Dan Yakir, chief legal counsel for the association, said there was no information on whether this person had been charged, tried or convicted.

”It is insupportable that, in a democratic country, authorities can arrest people in complete secrecy and disappear them from public view without the public even knowing such an arrest took place,” Mr Yakir wrote.

Earlier this year a gag order was lifted on the case involving Israeli journalist Anat Kamm, who was placed under house arrest last year after she was suspected of leaking secret documents to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that she obtained while serving in the Israel Defence Forces.

The gag order was lifted after details surrounding Kamm’s case were published outside Israel.

In 1983, Marcus Klingberg, a leading Israeli scientist, was jailed for 20 years for passing secrets about Israel’s biological warfare program to the Soviets. But it was only after he had been in jail for a decade that Israelis heard of his arrest and conviction.