Jerusalem: Israel`s intelligence agency Mossad has said that eight Iranian Jews, who tried to flee their country and had been missing since nearly two decades ago, were murdered while en route to Israel.
Israel`s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu`s office, in a statement issued here yesterday, said that Mossad had investigated and "received from a reliable source, privy to the details, information that these Jews were captured and murdered while escaping (Iran)."
However, the statement did not elaborate or point fingers at anyone for the killings but the disappearance of these men, followed by silence from Iran, have been cited by the US State Department as pointing to possible "anti-Semitic persecution".
The families of the missing Iranian Jews in Israel were officially informed about the findings, prior to the PMO announcement, after former Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar had issued a decree declaring the eight dead according to Jewish law.
The Mossad had long been trying to discover the fate of 11 Jews who tried to flee Iran for Israel in the 1990s, eight in 1994 and three in 1997.
Netanyahu had urged Mossad chief Tamir Pardo to intensify the efforts to find out the fate of the missing Iranian Jews.
The breakthrough in the investigation is said to have occurred only in the last few months, when intelligence officials obtained reliable information from a source knowledgeable about the details of the case.
This information indicated that the eight who fled in 1994 had been captured and killed.
Netanyahu then asked his special envoy for captives and MIAs, David Meidan, to tie up the loose ends in the case, the statement said.
"First and foremost, it`s a great intelligence achievement that they managed to lay their hands on a reliable source in a difficult region, who gave credible information from which a picture was obtained of what had befallen eight of the 11 missing people," Meidan was quoted by Israel`s daily Ha`aretz as saying.
The information about the progress in the investigation was passed on to Amar, who was Sephardi chief Rabbi and President of the Rabbinical Court of Appeals at the time.
The latter issued a ruling saying the information about the eight missing people was sufficiently reliable to declare them dead according to Jewish law.
The ruling will allow the widows of the missing to remarry. Meidan, Amar and another former Sephardi chief Rabbi, Eliyahu Bakshi-Doron, yesterday met the families to say the news.
"This was a sensitive, complex investigation that constitutes another achievement from the standpoint of Israel`s intelligence capabilities," the statement said.
"The task of investigating the other three missing people from 1997 continues," it said.
