Counsel for Defendant 1 replied that the interrogator informed him when Defendant 1 expressed his willingness to hand over the drugs, but clarified that when he sent Detectives Hamami and Buskila with him, he was still suspected of drug offenses and not of murder; in his opinion, the interrogator Asher Hasson had warned Defendant 1 on suspicion of murder in the first interrogation because he wanted to be "more in order than okay", since at that stage he was still not suspected of being involved in the murder and there was nothing that pointed to it (pp. 223-225).
Asked if it was not strange to him that the two defendants had asked to confess at close times, in the framework of informal conversations with police officers and not during the interrogation, he replied that this was a developing incident. Defendant 1 arrived as a witness in the morning, later drug offenses arose and he also tied up Defendant 2, and afterwards, when he knew that Defendant 2 was already at the station, he agreed to lead to the drugs; Defendant 2, on the other hand, came as a witness, and during the interrogation he understood that Defendant 1 had linked him to the drug offenses and apparently understood that the police knew about their involvement in the murder, and in a conversation with the commander of the Intelligence Unit, he tried to save himself; According to him, a kind of competition had opened between the defendants, in which "each tried to bring down the other" (pp. 228-230). Superintendent Michaeli rejected the claim that at this stage, information from the interrogation of the other had been passed on to one of the defendants, and explained that apart from the investigators who knew the versions that were given, the person who committed the acts also knew the details, and beyond that there were forensic findings and additional evidence (pp. 232-233).
In response to questions from counsel for defendant 2, Superintendent Michaeli replied that defendant 2 was initially summoned as a witness to the alibi given by defendant 1, but since he was not home and his parents brought him to the station later, the interrogation of defendant 1 had already revealed that he was involved in the drug deal, and therefore he was interrogated on suspicion of drug offenses. He also confirmed that even at the end of his first interrogation, there was no suspicion of Defendant 2's connection to the murder incident, until Investigator Malichi arrived and said that he wanted to provide information. When it was argued before him that Malichi's statements to Defendant 2 indicated that it was clear to them that he was connected to the murder, he replied that it might have been clear to Malichi, but if that were the case, he would have instructed Interrogator Benita to interrogate him on suspicion of murder, and if the conversation with Interrogator Malichi had been an interrogation exercise, he would have instructed him to record it (pp. 238-242). He later clarified that in a conversation with the commander of the Central Intelligence Unit, defendant 2 was not warned on suspicion of murder, since he was not a suspect in the murder, but rather they believed that he was a suspect in drug offenses who wanted to tell him something he knew about the murder, and did not know that he was involved in or connected to the murder; He noted that Investigator Malichi did not tell them what he had said to Defendant 2 before he asked to provide information about the murder, and that if he had believed that Defendant 2 was involved in the murder, he would have instructed the commander of the Intelligence Unit to warn him (pp. 245-249).