Blood of intelligence officer who died in prison sent to US
Israeli labs trying to determine if death was suicide reportedly unable to quantify amount of prescription drugs in his body
The blood of the intelligence officer who died in a military prison in May is being sent to a leading laboratory in the United States for further tests, Channel 12 News reported on Friday.
According to the report, the Israeli laboratories were unable to determine the amount of prescription medication that was later found to have been in the officer’s blood when he collapsed in his jail cell. It is hoped that the American laboratory will be able to give results that would determine if he committed suicide.
The family has rejected claims that Cpt. T took his own life.
Cpt. T was arrested in September and died in a military prison in May. He was behind bars for knowingly committing offenses that caused “severe damage to national security,” the IDF said.
On the evening of his death, he had told his cellmates that he was feeling sick and then vomited. He collapsed and lost consciousness a short time later. He was transferred to Laniado Hospital in Netanya in serious condition and later pronounced dead.
Following his death, he underwent an autopsy with a doctor representing the family present. The results of the toxicology tests have yet to be received and the official cause of death has not yet been given.
Many aspects of the case, such as the crimes he had been charged with and the investigation into his death, remain heavily censored, both by the military and a court order.
According to Friday’s report on Channel 12, the 24-year-old captain committed the crimes in order to compete with his colleagues.
Prior to his arrest, a number of failures were identified in the elite technological unit of the Intelligence Division where he was serving, causing the military to open an investigation into what was happening.
A team from the unit, including Cpt. T, was formed in order to identify what was causing the failures to occur.
Despite knowing that he was responsible, the report said he remained silent about his role in the failures. He was later arrested in the middle of the night in his home.
The investigation into Cpt. T found that he had “consciously carried out a number of acts that severely damaged state security,” and that he had been “aware of the potential damage to national security as a result of his actions and even tried to hide them.”
The military said that the officer, whose full identity remains under gag orders despite having been published online, “cooperated in his interrogation and confessed to many of the acts attributed to him,” and that the investigation found that he had “acted independently, for personal motives – and not for ideological, nationalist or economic motives.”
At the end of the investigation, he was indicted on charges alleging serious security offenses, the military said, adding that “weight was given to the significant damage caused by the alleged offenses.”
He was buried in a civilian cemetery and will not be considered as a fallen soldier since he had been released from the IDF while in prison at his own request. An investigation into his death has been opened by the IDF’s Internal Affairs Unit.