Attention will be drawn to two main points that were included in the alibi claim detailed in the response, and which were later changed. One relates to the purchase of food by self-collection only, and the other relates to the fact that from the moment the two returned to the family compound, the defendant did not leave until the joint drive north at 2:00 P.M., about an hour after the murder. In his testimony in court, the defendant gave a different version of these two figures. This time, the defendant claimed, in addition to purchasing food for later use, he and the "other", his cousin Udai, carried out other actions. They put the car in the wash and then went into the restaurant, sat there, ate, drank, and talked, and it took about an hour and a half to get home. The defendant also said for the first time in his testimony that after they returned to the family compound and he put the food he had bought in the refrigerator, he left the compound again in the Mazda, around a quarter to nine, for about fifteen minutes, in order to shop at a nearby grocery store.
The defendant was interrogated, of course, regarding the discrepancies between his testimony in court and the alibi claim that was given in writing as part of the response to the indictment, and claimed that he did not remember those details when formulating the response to the indictment in April 2024, and only remembered them after watching the various videos, such as the videos of the exit from the gas station near the family compound, together with his lawyers. In any event, it is clear that the frequent and substantial changes in relation to the alibi claim, which has been occupied for so long without any convincing explanation or justification, make it even more difficult to give any credence to the defendant's words.
As can be seen, the defendant's alibi claim is divided into two main parts. The first and main element of the alibi relates to the trip to the Khalil restaurant in Tzrifin, which I will refer to immediately, but even before that it would be appropriate to draw attention to the fact that the claim regarding staying in the restaurant relates only to the period between 7 a.m. and about 8:30 a.m., i.e., the period of time during which the morning surveillance of the victim's car by Mitsubishi and Toyota was conducted, which did not lead to any damage at that time. The murder itself was carried out only around 1:00 P.M. that day, and the sequence of actions began when the Mitsubishi left the family compound at 10:59 a.m. The defendant's main alibi argument therefore does not relate to going out in the morning for a flute hummus, but rather to his stay in the family compound one in a row from around 9:00 a.m., upon his return from the grocery store, until about 2:00 p.m., when he left the compound in a Mercedes in the direction of Haifa. According to him, the defendant was in the family compound at the time of the murder and in the hours preceding it, together with his father Shakir, his brother Muhammad, his cousin Udai, and many other uncles and nephews who live there. Against this background, the question arises in full force as to why the defendant did not bother to raise this simple alibi claim during his interrogation with the police and to provide the names of all the local residents as alibi witnesses. A similar question also arises with regard to the legal process itself, in which the defendant has already taken the trouble to detail the alibi claim, and yet he did not invite his brother Muhammad or other family members who were present at the scene to substantiate his alibi claim, and made do with the testimony of Udai and Shakir, unreliable witnesses, who gave suppressed versions. The result is that even before the difficulties involved in traveling to the Khalil restaurant, the defendant was not able to substantiate the main alibi claim, even primitively, - the claim that he was in the family compound at the time of the murder.