A close family friend of Dr. Ashraf Marwan, who died under mysterious circumstances in London last week, said that the suspected Mossad agent fell off a balcony and plunged to his death by accident, and not as the result of a revenge murder plot.

Although it was never proven, Marwan, a close confidante of Egyptian dictators Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat, as well as Nasser's brother in law, allegedly tipped off the Mossad on key information before and during the Yom Kippur War in 1973. In 1993, the head of IDF intelligence during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Major General Eli Zeira, identified Marwan as a double-agent who misled Israel about Egyptian intentions preceding the outbreak of the war. It was suspected that Marwan's death last Wednesday in London had been engineered either Egyptian intelligence services or the Mossad as “payback” for his activities.

But according to the family friend, an acquaintance who had been on his way to visit Marwan witnessed what he insisted was an accident. According to the friend, Marwan had been in a heated conversation on his cell phone, and apparently was not paying attention to where he was going – thus slipping and falling off the terrace of his high rise apartment.