In the present context, it would also be appropriate to cite the words of the Supreme Court in Criminal Appeal 1464/21 Kapustin v. M.I. (September 11, 2022), which, with the necessary adjustments, are also relevant to our case:
"To this must be added the suppressed testimonies of the appellant, which were given in the trial court, but were not claimed by him to the police. His suppressed claims were mostly made after he gave a general version in his various interrogations, but when he reached a stage where he could not find reasonable explanations for the questions he was asked, he decided to remain silent...
The rule is that "special caution is required in evaluating a suppressed version of defendants, and the weight of a suppressed version is very small, as a rule, unless the defendant has given a satisfactory explanation for the suppression" (Yaniv and Aki, Law of Evidence, vol. 1, 381 (2020)). In our case, the weight of the appellant's suppressed versions is even lower, because they were given only after he was presented with incriminating evidence against him found at the scene in his police interrogations (see my opinion in Criminal Appeal 5995/21 Al-Hassaneh v. State of Israel, para. 23 (June 16, 2022); and compare: Criminal Appeal 10477/09 Mubarak v. State of Israel, para. 30 (April 10, 2013); Criminal Appeal 7007/15 Shmil v. State of Israel, para. 33 (September 5, 2018)).
In our case, not only did the appellant's testimony leave an unreliable impression in its entirety, and it contained contradictions, perplexities and lies, but it was also determined that the lies he told were substantial lies and that his suppressed testimonies were given only after he was exposed to all the evidence material, "and thus he was able to artificially shape his version" (p. 143 of the judgment).
Moreover, despite the blatant attempt to adapt the current version to the evidence, more than once or twice, when the defendant sought to provide a possible explanation for one piece of evidence, the same explanation was slammed in the face of reality, as it was expressed in the evidence collected. In this context, I will revert to some of the issues that have already been discussed above, including the suppressed and false explanation given by the defendant regarding the date of inserting the fingerprint as a means of protection for WhatsApp, the explanation he gave for the silencing of the phones, which was inconsistent with the findings in the call output, the explanation he gave for the screenshot of August 7, 2022, which included details of the Mitsubishi, the explanations regarding Internet searches on the 337 subscriber on the day of the murder, and the allegations in relation (omitted). The aforesaid is sufficient to lead to the conclusion that no weight should be attributed to the defendant's suppressed version, which in practice also did not provide convincing answers to the accumulation of circumstantial evidence for his obligation. It was evident that this was an attempt, which did not succeed, to provide a response to each of the pieces of evidence collected, patch by patch, in an unreliable and unconvincing manner, with the only possible result being an outright rejection of the reliability of the defendant's latest version, with all its components.