In his testimony in court two years later, and similar to his conduct with regard to all evidentiary issues, the defendant gave a new and suppressed version of the Internet searches as well, and in his main testimony he said that at around 2:00 P.M., he left his home in Ramle in the direction of Haifa, in a Mercedes car, also belonging to Abu Khalifa, together with his cousin Udai. When asked about the search during the drive north, he replied that if he was not mistaken, a warning ("push") had been received on Telegram regarding the murder, and as a result, Udai, who was sitting next to him in the passenger seat, began to search for additional information, using the defendant's 337 subscription [transcript of September 11, 2024, at pp. 484-485].
When asked about this again on the same day during the cross-examination, he explicitly stated that he had lied when he said that he did not know about the murder until he was arrested, and claimed that he knew about it when he was on his way to Haifa, following the publication received on Telegram, following which Udai began the search. In response to the plaintiff's questions, the defendant said that the alert had been received on his Telegram, but did not remember its exact content. As a result, he was asked to address the question of how the name "Marwan" was searched, which is the name of the deceased, and not his official name, and the defendant replied that he did not remember. He was also asked how they knew how to conduct a search that included any name of the victim, since the name had not yet been published at that stage. The defendant did not know how to answer this, and offered to direct the question to Udai, who he claimed actually carried out the searches [ibid., at pp. 599-602].
Moving on to the defendant's supplementary cross-examination on September 25, 2024, a conspiracy investigation was conducted, under the direction of the accuser, in which two items of information of importance to our case were revealed. First, it became clear from another intrusion into the phone on which subscriber 337 was sitting, that the Telegram application was first downloaded to the device on August 26, 2022 at 14:48, and that the first connection to it, and the receipt of the code for this purpose, was carried out only at 15:46 [P/187 in paragraphs 8 and 9 of the chapter dealing with the penetration of subscriber 337]. Second, in the renewed penetration of theA32 device, on which 685 subscribed at the time, a group was located on Telegram called "Yediotnews", in which a report was published on August 26, 2022, at 13:25, according to which "a 50-year-old man was shot in Lod - his condition is critical...", without the name of the victim [P/187 - para. 8 of the chapter relating to the penetration of the A32].