Hagai Amir
Hagai AmirFlash 90

Hagai Amir, brother of Yigal Amir convicted of killing Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin, this morning addressed the storm surrounding "conspiracy theories" about the murder, this time triggered by Dr. Mordechai Kedar's speech.

In a Facebook post under an account he manages under the fictitious name Emmanuel Goldstein, the name of the invented bogeyman enemy-of-the-party figure in George Orwell's classic novel 1984, Amir opens by saying his brother did indeed shoot with the intention of hitting Rabin: "Yigal Amir did shoot to defuse Rabin and arrest Oslo."

However, he said, "The facts are that Rabin did not respond to the shooting even though these were hollowpoint bullets aimed at the spine from a maximum of half-a-meter. He thought there was some malfunction and so fired two more times.

"The whole shooting was performed in a standing position for both him and Rabin, and beyond that he knows nothing," added Hagai Amir, who knew of his brother's intentions in real time.

"When it became clear in recent years that there were all kinds of documents that testified to the involvement of others, he applied for a re-trial that was rejected, and now they're working on another appeal; these are the facts," Amir concluded.