Given that these meetings ended about a week before the controversial interrogation (P/172), and that the interrogation P/172 was carried out by police investigators and not intelligence personnel, it was claimed that the defendant saw and the interrogators saw a direct connection between these two processes, and that the defendant's statements made in the framework of P/172 were in fact part of the ongoing negotiations to bring him to be a state witness, and that the interrogation P/172 In fact, it constitutes a stage and a continuation of negotiations for a state-witness agreement.
Counsel for the accuser claims that from a perusal of the defendant's interrogations, the defendant's statements were made of his own free will, and the term "state witness" never came up at any stage of the investigation.
Counsel for the accuser referred to section 54a(a) of the Evidence Ordinance [Consolidated Version], 5731-1971, and the FamilyAppeal Guidelines 4.2201, and emphasizes that the essence of the term "state witness" is that a suspect will testify against others, and this was not the case in this case.
It was argued that the negotiations that were conducted with the defendant were in relation to the return of the weapons, since it was a weapon of exceptional importance and it was an unusual activity in which intelligence personnel approached with the aim of returning it before innocent people were harmed (the accuser's counsel refers to the statements of military personnel in charge of the weapons - P/26-P/28), and that this was supposed to be carried out in a confidential manner.
It was claimed that the talks with the intelligence personnel were a separate stage, nothing was promised, there was no talk at all about the defendant being a state witness, in any case this stage was over, and the initiative to promote a deal for his release in exchange for the weapons was the defendant's.
The Normative Framework in Relation to a State Witness
- Section 54A)A) To the Ordinance The Evidence states that a state witness, For the purposes of that section, He :
"An accomplice to the same offense who testifies on behalf of the prosecution after a benefit has been given or promised to him."