Thus the discussion of the first three layers of evidence, which are not even in real dispute, and the time is ripe to discuss the main issues, at the heart of which is the question of whether the accuser was able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that it was the defendant who held the 685 subscription on the day of the murder, and therefore it was he who was in Mitsubishi that day and conducted the telephone conversations with subscriber 141. For this purpose, all the connections between the defendant and subscriber 685 will be examined, and later also the specific evidence in relation to the day of the murder and other nearby dates, regarding which the defendant claimed, as will be further detailed, that subscriber 685 was in the hands of another person.
On the relationship between the defendant and subscriber 685 - up to the day of the murder
Upon the defendant's arrest on 29 August 2022, three mobile phones were seized in the Mazda vehicle, which the defendant confessed, both in his police interrogation and in his testimony in court, that they had been used in the period preceding the day of the murder. This is an iPhone 13 Pro Max (IMEI: 353324658834947), with a subscription number 050-3036401 (hereinafter: "401"), a Samsung Galaxy S21 (IMEI: 355066961195015) with a subscription number 050-6908337 (hereinafter: "337") and a Samsung Galaxy A32 (IMEI: 350275955449057/350131655449055), which at the time of its seizure was carrying a subscription number 055-9500761 (hereinafter: "761"), but according to media studies, it bore a subscription number 685 From 6 July 2022 until late at night on 28 August 2022, two days after the murder [P/83 - Report on the Extraction of Insights from the DCC].
This last statistic indicates that on the day of the murder, as well as in the weeks preceding it, subscriber 685 "sat" on one of the defendant's three cell phones. Nevertheless, throughout the entire police investigation, the defendant denied any connection to subscriber 685, and claimed that he did not know this number. Initially, in interrogations on 1 September 2022 and 14 September 2022, he claimed that with the exception of the 401 subscriber, which is his main subscriber, he did not remember the rest of his telephone numbers. In the next interrogation, on 28 September 2022, after he was directly confronted with the use attributed to him of the 685 subscription, he claimed that this number was not known to him, and finally, in his last interrogation on 6 October 2022, he explicitly stated that "I have no connection to telephone 685" [P/164 - transcript of the interrogation, at p. 75]. And now, in complete contradiction to the claims he made in his many police interrogations, when he came to testify in court, the defendant admitted for the first time that he knew the number 685 well and served him as a secondary number, along with subscribers 401 and 337, in the period preceding the murder.