25th September 1998

FRONT PAGE

WHO SHOT RABIN?

‘Amir’s bullet hit PM in back. It was one at point blank range in chest that killed the Israeli leader’

EXCLUSIVE by URI GELLER

AN ISRAELI journalist insists that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated – but not by Yigal Amir.

And he believes he has evidence that despite videa footage showing Amir shooting Rabin in the back, medical reports indicate that he was shot point-blank in the chest.

Journalist Barry Chamish, editor of the political intelligence report Inside Israel, has put the evidence under a microscope, and found facts that appear to leave no room for question.

Rabin was murdered. Police and medical reports obtained by Chamish show the PM was shot point-blank in the chest. The video of ultra-rightist Yigal Amir, flashed round the world by news stations, shows him firing at Rabin from behind.

How can a shot in the back become a fatal chest wound?

“The conspiracy is proved beyond a shadow of doubt,” Chamish told me.

“This isn’t a conspiracy theory, it’s a crime exposé. My country has sunk into such sick criminality it is unbelievable.”

Chamish in full flow is an impressive sight. He’s a bear-like man with restless eyes and a ferocious energy that makes him punch home his argument with swinging, driving gestures.

He crashes through objections and doubts like a 38-tonne juggernaut loaded with facts. This can be counter-productive – no one is right all of the time, and there are too many insoluble mysteries in every crevice of Israel’s political history to allow anyone to be certain about anything.

But without that conviction, that infallibility, Chamish could not spread his message. And it’s taking hold – he claims to have convinced more than 30 per cent of Israelis.

The official version has anti-peace protestor Amir, an activist with the Organisation of Jewish Warriors (Eyal), stalking Rabin at a Tel Aviv rally, slipping behind him and gunning him down with two bullets – the second fired as bodyguards wrestled the assassin to the ground. Fatally wounded, Rabin is bundled into his limousine, but dies that night in Ichilov Hospital.

We see it on the video – the figure in the crowd, the gunflash, the confusion, the scramble to get Rabin into his car. But is that what we really see?

Chamish, taking the evidence frame by frame, says not. He points to the bodyguards – why did they step out of the way as they approached Amir? They were allegedly warned of an impending attack. Surely they could not have been briefed to slacken at this crucial moment. Could they?

He points to the gunflash – why does it explode several feet from the end of Amir’s arm? Why does it appear to be fired with a left-handed action, when Amir is right-handed?

Surely this footage was not doctored before release. Was it? He points to Rabin.

At the instant a bullet fatally injures him, severing his spine, the Prime Minister turns quizzically. He looks over his shoulder, as though a noise has distracted him – the noise of blank cartridges, for instance. He walks on. A man with a severed spine walks on. Surely he was not uninjured here – only to be shot dead later. Was he?

Chamish points to the car. The driver and the bodyguard testified there was no one inside. Why then do Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and his bodyguards appear to be discussing the car, with its offside rear door wide open, seconds before Amir shoots?

Why does the door mysteriously close itself? Surely the car could not have hidden a hitman, Rabin’s real killer. Could it?

The mystery becomes mind-boggling when Chamish reminds us Rabin’s car took over eight minutes to reach the hospital, just a few hundred yards away. The driver claimed he got lost. Lost – while the PM bled to death in the back.

The death certificate signed by Dr Mordecai Gutman, one of Rabin’s surgeons, stated he was shot through the chest from the front, shattering his spine. Remarks made by Shimon Peres at a memorial confirmed that.

But Amir shot from behind. Chamish’s terrifying conclusion is that the hitman, who must have had the complicity of Israel’s Shabbak, the internal secret service, was under orders – maybe from a foreign power.

This was not a lone killing by a nutcase. But it was bungled.

Rabin, says Chamish, was shot in the back with blanks, and in the chest in his own car, with his bodyguard beside him and his driver at the wheel. And these shots may not have killed him – Chamish believes the coup de grace was executed in Ichilov Hospital.

Why? Why kill Rabin the peace-maker? Because peace could hurt Israel? Because the peace was flagging, and Rabin had to be replaced?

Because Rabin had offended some international power-broker?

Here we are back in the shadowy realm of conspiracy theories.

But we ask the questions because we fear the truth – that Chamish’s version is the only possible explanation.

? Who Murdered Yitzhak Rabin, by Barry Chamish will be published in the UK next month by Turnaround Books. (Feral House $12.95 ISBN 0-922915-50-4)

? Who Murdered Yitzhak Rabin: Video lecture at Toronto Zionist Center ($17.95, to Robert Sterling, c/o the Konformist, PO Box 24825, Los Angeles CA 90024-0825)

? Chamish’s website – http://www.webseers.com/rabin