Hagai Amir questions Rabin assassination

Hagai Amir, accomplice to the murder of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and brother of assassin Yigal Amir, took to Facebook on Monday night to highlight what he said are “open questions” surrounding the Rabin assassination.

In a nearly 800-word post on his Facebook page, the 43-year-old Amir said that when his brother fired the first shot at Rabin the prime minister did not respond and continued on his way. Amir also repeated a common refrain of conspiracy theorists that after the first shot was fired someone was heard shouting “blanks, blanks.”

“We also have questions. Why did someone yell ‘blanks, blanks?’ Why did Rabin not respond to the shooting? Why did the second bullet not hit anything, even in such a crowded space that it would have had to hit something? How did the third bullet enter at a 45- degree angle when my brother couldn’t have reached this angle?” he asked in the post.

Amir also pointed a finger at Rabin’s bodyguard Yoram Rubin, saying that he changed his version of events during the investigation and the trial of Yigal Amir.

“If there was really a free press in Israel they would have investigated him because he is probably the key to solving what happened,” Amir said of Rubin, who was wounded by the third bullet fired by Amir.

Amir said Monday that his brother was filled with suspicion that he was being followed by the Shin Bet General Security Services in the time leading up to the assassination on November 4, 1995.

In a jab at the Shin Bet, Amir said that “in retrospect I know that we were mistaken in our assessment of the Shin Bet’s capabilities who were not then nor [are] today suited to deal with this matter.” He added that his brother emptied and reloaded the clip of his .380 pistol several times on the night of the murder, in order to make sure the hollow point rounds he’d loaded were followed by copper-jacketed rounds, which have a higher penetration.

He said that in order to thwart investigators, his brother also made sure to take the bus that night to the rally in Rabin Square in Tel Aviv, and that even Hagai himself did not know when his brother left the family house in Herzliya that night.

In May, Amir was freed from Ayalon Prison in Ramle after serving 16 and a half years for conspiracy to commit murder and possession of a firearm. In 2006, he was convicted of threatening to have then-prime minister Ariel Sharon killed, for which he was given an additional six months in prison. He has never expressed remorse for his role in the assassination.

The Shin Bet said Tuesday night that they have no intention of responding to Amir’s post.