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Medical Examiner Yehuda Hiss points to indications of two bullets but denies the existence of a third: "You don't need to be an x-ray expert to see two bullets." (From the Documentary "Case Not Closed?" screened on Israeli Channel Two
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First bullet, shot from the front, which pierced Rabin's lung and lodged in his spinal cord. Ballistics indicate that it could not have been a hollowpoint.
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Second hollowpoint bullet.
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| By Israel Insider staff and partners November 18, 2005 |
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| Rabin xray (facing down) from the Channel Two documentary "Case Not Closed?" |
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Part Four in a Series. Click here for Parts 1, 2, and 3.
The documentary "Case Not Closed?" -- screened earlier this month on Channel Two television -- has revealed new medical evidence which has produced the most coherent explanation to date of how Yitzhak Rabin was murdered. The evidence indicates that Yigal Amir shot blank bullets, which -- contrary to the Shin Bet [Israel's internal security service, responsible for guarding the Prime Minister] plan to stage a failed assassination attempt -- caused the Prime Minister to stop breathing. Analysis of medical evidence by investigator Natan Gefen proves that none of the bullets which entered Rabin -- the last two, shockingly, fired in the hospital itself, could have been fired by Amir.
In an article "The Ball Game is Over," Dr. Joshua Backon of Hebrew University's medical faculty, the narrative and the photographic evidence is presented in English, relying largely on Hebrew-language article "Why was Rabin declared dead twice? by Rabin murder investigator Natan Gefen, author of Fatal Sting [Oketz Catlani, in Hebrew].
Gefen's incisive and carefully argued analysis, which includes original medical reports and x-rays and photographs, indicates that Rabin arrived at Ichilov Hospital, less than two minutes away from the Kings of Israel Square where he was shot at 9:30 pm, only after 22 minutes, in an ambulance (not the Cadillac limousine in which he was carried from the site) -- already intubated (with a breathing tube inserted). Incredibly, no one had phoned ahead that he was coming -- incredibly, that is, unless the authorities believed that there would be no need for a hospital because the Prime Minister would not need medical treatment. That, too, would explain why Rabin was carried off in the limousine, driven by Shimon Peres' driver Menachem Damti, rather than in one of the two ambulances waiting next to the limousine.
At 9:52, the intubated Rabin was transferred from the ambulance and admitted to the hospital -- inexplicably, anonymously. In "Case Not Closed?" one of the doctors mentions that none of those treating the unnamed patient initially had any clue that it was Rabin. Only some 12 minutes later, apparently after was the admission form updated to indicate that the patient, suffering from a single frontal chest wound, was none other than the Prime Minister of Israel. For nearly a half hour, the doctors provide the patient with eight units of blood and manage to stabilize his condition, although he is still unable to breathe on his own but is still connected to a respirator.
At this point, according to diverse reports from medical staff, Shin Bet agents entered the surgical suite and ordered medical personnel removed. A minute or two later, the Shin Bet agents leave the suite, stating that Rabin is alive. But when the doctors returned to their patient, they discover to their shock and horror, that he has been shot two additional times -- in the back. One form, written and signed by the Dr. Mordechai "Motti" Gutman, indicates that the time of death was 10:30 and explicitly references only the single chest wound. A second form, which came to be the official death pronouncement, states the "official" time of death at 11:00. All references to the chest wound were subsequently expunged from the hospital records and the videotape of the autopsy "recycled," as Hiss reported in the documentary to the astonished filmmaker.
According to Dr. Backon's interpretation, the Shin Bet planners of the staged assassination did not take into account that even blank bullets can cause serious injury or even death when fired from close range. Shot at point blank they can kill; at a distance of 30-35 cm, the empty cartridges can cause nerve damage, specifically, in this case, to the dermatone nerves which enable respiration.
Summarizes Backon: "Rabin isn't supposed to be harmed in any manner shape or form. The plan is to bring him to Ichilov Hospital (75 second car trip away) where doctors would declare him safe and sound. The government would then clamp down on the Right. This explains why there is no blood at the site of the shooting, no spent cartridges, why Shabak [the Hebrew acronym for the Shin Bet] guards didn't kill Amir on sight, why the two trauma ambulance crews (docs and paramedics) stationed 10 feet away from where Rabin was "shot" are rebuffed when they offer to treat the "wounded" Rabin, why people shouted "SRAK! SRAK!" ("Blanks! Blanks), why the Shabak told Leah Rabin that her husband was OK and the whole thing was just an "exercise", and why when a senior police officer from the Police Identification Unit takes the gun used by Amir as material evidence has the gun forcibly (and illegally) removed from him by the Shabak. The "gun" is returned the next day. Rabin is taken to the hospital in the Cadillac limousine: the hospital is NOT informed to be ready for a trauma patient."
Somewhere during what was expected to be a brief and uneventful trip to the hospital, where Rabin was to have emerged safe and sound, Backon speculates, something must have gone terribly wrong. "In the 75 second car ride to the hospital, Rabin stops breathing. He still has a strong pulse and the dopes inside the car KNOW it's not a heart attack. They panic. They have no idea what is causing this. They think he's dying which ISN'T SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN. If they bring him to the hospital and there's no gunshot wound [they know Amir is supposed to shoot Rabin with blanks but surmise he shot Rabin from the front TO THE CHEST] their moronic plan (fake assassination attempt) gets revealed."
And so -- someone in the Shin Bet who realizes that Rabin is dying, improbably, from blank bullets, apparently decided -- either in the car or at nearby Shin Bet headquarters where Rabin is reportedly taken after his driver and remaining bodyguards discover he is not breathing, and eventually transfer him to an ambulance, have him intubated, and delivered to the hospital, initially as an anonymous patient suffering from a gunshot wound.
Gefen's report concludes with the declaration that Rabin's medical case is finally, after ten years exactly, closed: "A frontal shot to the chest killed Rabin; after declaring his death and stopping medical treatment, two additional hollowpoint bullets were fired into his body, one into his back from the right and the second to his left hip, after which Rabin was transferred to an operating room where his death was declared a second time."
The latest evidence strongly suggests that the plan was not to kill Rabin but rather -- as the Shin Bet repeatedly did using its "agent provocateur" Avishay Raviv -- to stage an outrageous provocation meant to sway public opinion to support the Prime Minister's policies, to incriminate his opponents, and to permit a crackdown on their activities -- all of which did in fact happen after the "staged" assassination attempt tragically turned into a real murder.
The new revelations further strengthens the evidence of a pervasive and systematic cover-up of the murder in official Israeli circles, beginning within the Shin Bet itself, but pointing also to collaboration after the fact by senior political figures -- those in charge of the security agency as well as legal and medical officials who either forged documentary evidence, concealed it, perjured themselves, or failed to ask the required and in many cases obvious questions about the glaring inconsistencies and stark contradictions in the official version of what happened on that terrible night ten years ago.
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