Unraveling the Mystery: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin

The Year: 1995. The Place: Kings of Israel Square, Tel Aviv. Possibility: An inside accomplice.

It may be the most clichéd mystery. There's no need to introduce Barry Chamish or the findings of the official commission of inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the death of Yitzhak Rabin. Often called "the father of Israeli conspiracy theories," Chamish doesn't leave a particularly mysterious impression. Of average height and appearance, the only striking feature might be his scruffy, reddish beard.

For years, he has been dedicated to exposing the plot that led to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's assassination and the cover-up efforts made to conceal the truth. Although the cover-up was executed with great professionalism, someone like Chamish was not deterred by the challenges and dangers. With the trained eyes of a veteran conspiracy hunter, he identifies the faint clues left by the conspirators, piecing together incriminating information from thousands of documents threatening to drown him in a sea of words and numbers.

In the spectrum of conspiracy believers, Chamish sits at the extreme end, but he isn't the only one who thinks not all questions regarding this infamous political assassination have been answered.

Questions begin with the fact that one of the people closest to the assassin was a Shin Bet agent, Avishai Raviv. They continue with discrepancies between Amir's reenactment of the shooting and the images captured by photographer Roni Kampner's lens. Another famous question is who shouted "blank, blank," heard clearly in the film recording, and why.

Could it be that someone within the Shin Bet believed the bullets Amir fired were blanks? Could the Shin Bet have replaced real bullets with blanks to catch Amir "in the act," but Amir caught onto the trick and swapped the bullets back?

Another bundle of questions concerns the extended time it took Rabin's driver to reach Ichilov Hospital from the attack site. The fact that for 15 minutes the car roamed the streets of Tel Aviv aimlessly, without escort or supervision, with a severely injured and bleeding Prime Minister inside, should alarm even the staunchest believers in the official version. There are also claims about a mysterious figure seen inside the Prime Minister's car at a time when it was supposed to be empty.

One of the strangest episodes associated with the assassination is that of Roni Kampner, the amateur photographer who was the only one to capture the assassination itself on camera. The existence of the video tape Kampner shot was only revealed a week after the assassination and came as a complete surprise. The circumstances of the filming, as well as the photographer's personality, remain shrouded in mystery.

According to media reports, Kampner received a substantial sum of $350,000 for selling the tape to a media outlet. But what drove him to position himself on the dark rooftop of a building overlooking the parking lot, capturing seemingly random movements of passersby? What explains his repeated focus on Yigal Amir? And why did it take him a week to reveal the tape's existence?

In the few interviews he gave to the media at the time, Kampner offered only vague explanations, leaving a trail of unresolved questions. He mentioned being driven by an "inner voice" to continue filming the parking lot and that the delay in publishing the tape was because he wasn't aware of the event's significance at the time, or he was utterly shocked by what he witnessed.

"...I've never encountered such a phenomenon," wrote photo editor Shalom Bar-Tal of 'Yediot Achronot' in those days. "In an impossible situation, in an unexpected place, a photographer focuses on seemingly random things that, within minutes, become the most astonishing. It's unbelievable, as if he had prophetic insight or just wild luck. The photographer focused on Yigal Amir in a 'ping-pong' manner. He panned back and forth with the lens several times. You watch his camera dance and wonder, isn't there something prophetic here? As if the photographer expected a connection between Amir and Rabin. The photographer repeatedly zoomed in on the assassin, trying to capture him from an angle where his victim would appear in a few minutes. It was essentially a photographic ambush."

The most significant problem conspiracy theory proponents face, particularly those holding extreme views, is that the assassin himself does not cooperate with them. During his trial, Amir didn't deny he shot the Prime Minister or claim any mysterious organization was behind the act. On the other hand, it's possible the conspiracy was so sophisticated that not even Amir himself knew it wasn't his finger pulling the trigger...