Investigator Asher Hasson testified that during the first interrogation of Defendant 1, he entered the interrogation in order to change the status of Defendant 1 from a witness to an interrogee under a warning on suspicion of murder; this was following a report he received from an intelligence officer at the Sderot station according to which a person resembling Defendant 1 was seen on the security cameras of a gas station, while Defendant 1 said during the interrogation that he was at home all the time (p. 80).
In his cross-examination, the interrogator clarified that at the initial stage, there were no suspects in the murder; that even before defendant 1 arrived for interrogation, there was a conversation output that testified to communication between him and the deceased, but this did not make him a suspect in the murder (p. 82); and that in the interrogation of Defendant 1, the matter of the drug deal, to which he connected Defendant 2, came up, and this is how things unfolded (p. 90). He further explained that the interrogation was carried out in the first stage at the Sderot station and not at the Lachish District Court for convenience and efficiency considerations, because they were already there; He rejected the claim that it was done as a maneuver, in order to give the interrogation an innocent character related to a drug investigation only (pp. 82-83).
Investigator Shai Lazmi answered questions from counsel for defendant 2 that although the interrogation of the defendants understood that they were connected to the murder in some way and knew about it, they were not suspected of murder at first; when the interrogation was conducted fairly and sensitively, and they gave the defendants all the rights to which they are entitled (p. 159). According to him, he decided tactically to interrogate Defendant 1 in connection with drugs in order to advance the investigation and establish his intuition that he was in some way connected to the murder; However, this was not a pre-planned exercise and no other researchers were involved in it (pp. 160-161).