When the defendant refused to provide samples of the manuscript for comparison, the paper clipping was sent to a forensic documents laboratory, where the expert Gabi Ariel was asked to make a comparison between the manuscript on the paper clipping and a collection of documents seized during a search of the defendant's home, which the investigators assumed were written, almost all of them, in the defendant's handwriting. Among other things, a blue diary, a checkbook, a receipt book and an invoice book were sent for comparison purposes. However, an examination of all those examples for comparison revealed, according to the expert opinion, that the samples contain various manuscripts, and that the lack of dictated manuscript examples containing the exact content of the drawings in dispute, as well as the multitude of manuscripts in random samples, constitute a limitation in the examination. In these circumstances, a comparison was finally made against only two original examples, a receipt and an invoice from the books seized, in which the manuscript was uniform.
In her testimony in court, the expert explained that it was one of the investigators in the case who referred her to these two documents and instructed her to make the comparison with them. According to the expert's opinion, there were "signs of conformity" between the handwriting on the paper clipping and the one on the receipt and the invoice, a term that indicates, according to the scale in the appendix to the opinion, that a match was found in the characteristics of the writing, and no findings were found that negate a match. However, the quality and/or quantity of the characteristics to be tested was low. This is, according to the appendix, the lowest level of conformity among the three levels of conformity, as opposed to non-conformity or cases in which it is not possible to reach any conclusion [P/144 - the opinion, P/144B + C - the original documents with which the comparison was made].
To complete the picture, I will note that the comparison documents P/144B and C were presented to the defendant during his cross-examination in court, and then the defendant claimed for the first time that although these were invoices of his business, of which he was the sole authorized signatory, the person who actually wrote down the details on the invoices was his late brother Sabri, and the defendant would only sign the invoices. The defendant also claimed that if his and Sabri's phones were checked, it would be possible to locate WhatsApp messages between Sabri and the 401 subscriber, in which Sabri informed the defendant that the invoices were ready and that he could come and sign them. In practice, no documentation of such correspondence was found in the 401 subscriber, and the defendant further claimed that because he changed devices from time to time, it is possible that these correspondences were not saved. However, the defense did not request that Sabri's phone, where the conversations are stored, be examined, according to the defendant's claim [transcript of September 11, 2024, at pp. 593-596, of September 25, 2024, at pp. 668-669].