NZ Prime Minister denies Israeli backpackers were spies
New Zealand Prime Minister John Key is denying a story I blogged late Tuesday night, which claimed that four Israelis who were trapped in the Christchurch earthquake last February were Mossad agents.
Speaking to reporters in San Francisco this afternoon, Mr Key said there was a police and SIS investigation because of the rapid way in which the Israelis left the country after the February earthquake.
"In the view of the agencies there was no link between those individuals and the Israeli intelligence agencies."
He said he spoke to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu only once and there no request to facilitate the removal of the Israelis.
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While there have been reports that one of the Israeli men who was killed in the earthquake had five passports on him, Mr Key said this was incorrect.
Mr Key said his advice was that the man was found with only one passport, of European origin.
The other three people who had been in the van took their own passports with them when they left the country, and handed over the deceased man's Israeli passport to Israeli representatives before departing.
"None of the passports were New Zealand passports," Mr Key said.
But Key's comments have done little to calm the furor. Here's video of him talking to New Zealand reporters in San Francisco on Tuesday, which will give you some idea why the furor has not died down.
Let's go to the videotape.
By the way, a lot of individuals hold more than one passport. I do, as does every member of my family (we all hold US and Israeli passports).
After almost a day of stonewalling, Key confirmed the probe, which involved the spy agency SIS, concluded there was no evidence they were Israeli intelligence agents.
In a carefully worded statement, he also verified a dead Israeli van driver had two passports. Three occupants who escaped the wreckage took their passports back to Israel, he said.
It comes after the defence force confirmed elite SAS troops were in Christchurch's red zone after the disaster - but insisted they weren't dealing with an unaccredited rescue squad.
Key, currently on a visit to the US, said the investigation was triggered by the rapid departure from New Zealand of three Israelis who survived the February 22 quake.
"Security agencies conducted the investigation and found no evidence that the people were anything other than backpackers," he said.
[Southland Times editor Fred] Tulett told Newstalk ZB the initial information given to him - including the fact that Ofer Mizrahi, who died in the quake when the van he was in was crushed by debris, was carrying extra passports - was checked with other sources, including an intelligence agency source.
Mr Tulett also put the allegations to Israeli Ambassador Shemi Tzur.
"He said he was angry and upset at the suggestions that these were Israeli spies or that any of them were Israeli spies, and that's not surprising of course," Mr Tulett said.
He says there were too many unusual things going on.
Meanwhile, the Jewish community in Wellington, New Zealand, is outraged.
Wellington Regional Jewish Council Chairman David Zwartz said the story was unhelpful.
“We are very pleased to hear the prime minister's statement and we are also disgusted with how the story appeared from the very beginning to be a total beat-up and fabrication,” he told NZPA.
“Really the whole thing, and all the people who commented, were just smearing.”
Unfortunately, blood libels have started from much less. What could go wrong?
New Zealand's Southland Times is reporting that four Israelis who were trapped in a van near the epicenter of the Christchurch earthquake in February were Mossad agents, three of whom escaped the country. The fourth person, Ofer Mizrachi, who was the van's driver, was found dead in the van, and was claimed to be carrying five passports.
Those four Israelis – Ofer Benyamin Mizrahi, 23, from Kibbutz Magal near Haifa, Michal Fraidman, Liron Sade and Guy Jordan – would later become a prime focus of the SIS investigation, along with the Israeli search and rescue squad and a group of forensic analysts from Israel that worked in the Christchurch morgue helping to identify earthquake victims.
The four, two men and two women, had been shopping in the central city on the morning of the earthquake and had returned to their van, parked in Gloucester St, when the quake hit. Mizrahi, the driver, was killed instantly, and Jordan, in the front passenger seat, smashed a window and climbed through the hole to escape. The two women, Fraidman and Sade, who were sitting in the back seat, also managed to crawl out.
They were unable to reach Mizrahi and, after taking photographs of the crushed van, made their way to Latimer Square, where Israeli officials had set up an emergency meeting point. Within 12 hours they had left New Zealand.
On Sunday, February 26, Mizrahi's body was recovered from the van and taken to the morgue where, during routine identity checks, he was found to be carrying at least five passports.
Meanwhile, the search and rescue squad dispatched from Israel had arrived in Christchurch but the offer of help was rejected by New Zealand authorities because the squad did not have accreditation from the United Nations.
According to Israeli newspaper reports, the squad was being funded by the parents of two other Israelis killed in the earthquake, Ofer Levy and Gabi Ingel, both 22, who were said to be in New Zealand on a backpacking holiday. The parents made repeated public appeals for the Israeli team to join the rescue, appeals that were dismissed by the New Zealand authorities until squad members were discovered in the sealed off "red zone" of the central city.
It is understood the squad members were confronted by armed New Zealand officers and removed from the area. That confrontation is understood to have led to intense diplomatic exchanges between New Zealand and Israel, though police have refused to comment on the incident or even acknowledge that it occurred, and the Israeli ambassador says he had not been advised of any such incident.
Another Israeli group, a forensic analysis team sent by the Israeli government, was welcomed in Christchurch and worked on victim identification in the morgue.
However, the SIS also began to have suspicions about this group when it began investigating possible links between the cache of passports found with Mizrahi, the immediate flight of his three companions, the high-powered Israeli interest shown in the earthquake, the unexplained behaviour of the supposed "search and rescue squad" and a mysterious seventh Israeli, in New Zealand illegally, who was first reported missing in the quake and then, weeks later, was reported to have left the country. They were also interested in the Facebook tribute page set up for Mizrahi that has attracted only five "likes" in the more than four months it has been on the social media site.
When it was realised the forensic analysts could have accessed the national police computer database, an urgent security audit was ordered.
As the SIS officer explained, it would take only moments for a USB drive to be inserted in a police computer terminal and loaded with a program allowing remote backdoor access.
"We were concerned that could have happened," the officer said.
"We carried out an urgent audit. If it had been done it would eventually have given the Israelis access to all of our intelligence."
The national database holds all records of convictions, firearms licences, lost and stolen property, criminal behaviour and identifying marks and observations taken by police. It is capable of sophisticated searching and data matching. The officer said the audit had not identified any suspicious files so far, but a wider SIS investigation was continuing.
"It all looks suspicious, but a lot of what the Israelis do raises suspicion. So lots of smoke but we haven't found any fires. The file remains open though."
Ofer Mizrahi was killed after a block of concrete collapsed on his car. Foreign reports suggest that a parcel of his effects contained several passports, possibly five or six. Ambassador Tzur confirmed that Mizrahi, 23, had more than one passport but was not aware of reports of as many as five or six.
Tzur rejected claims that three of Mizrahi's friends fled the country because they were Mossad agents. "I drove his three friends to the airport so they could go home. They were shocked and crying, they were just talking about their friend," he said.
Israel and New Zealand's relations have been strained since 2004's "passport affair" involving two Israelis who tried to fraudulently issue New Zealand passports. A local court ruled they were Mossad agents. New Zealand's prime minister even declared sanctions against Israel following the affair.
The crisis ended after Israel apologized 18 months later. The Israeli embassy reopened in August 2005, but remained an extension of the Canberra Embassy.
It's not clear to me who offered help and whose help was rejected. Both Zaka and the IDF are accredited byt he UN.
I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-five years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 13 to 33 years and nine grandchildren. Four of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com
New Zealand Prime Minister John Key is denying a story I blogged late Tuesday night, which claimed that four Israelis who were trapped in the Christchurch earthquake last February were Mossad agents. 
