Former state attorney Shai Nitzan said this evening (Friday) that former senior attorney general Moshe Saada is a “liar and vindictive person who acts out of personal interests”. In an interview with Dov Gil-Har, Tamar Almog and Yoav Karakovski on the “Hashavu” show at Khan 11, he responded to the claims made this week by the former deputy head of the National Security Service on News 12, saying that these were “a night of lies, distortions, half-truths and hallucinations.
“The public must understand that this is not a lawyer who finished his duties, retired and now says what’s on his mind,” said Nitzan. “Until 2018, I worked with him for many years, he was great. In 2018, I and a whole team did not choose him as director of the National Security Agency, suddenly he turned around and started hurling accusations and claims and started a war. Two and a half years ago they announced that they could no longer tolerate this, and he was fired.”
“People who do terrible things are very difficult to fire,” added Nitzan. According to him, two weeks before Nitzen finished his post, he was told that Saada was “going around the police station, slandering the state attorney, saying that he would take revenge on the state attorney and campaigning to vote for Likud.” “I may have been wrong not to complain to the commission. He promised me he wouldn’t do it again.”
“The claim that I called Moshe Saada to the bureau and offered a silence fee is an abominable lie,” Nitzan clarified in an interview. “The man asked to retire, I have an email from him about it. We negotiated the terms of retirement. I thought even then that it was problematic for him to remain in the system. He refused to accept Merot as the head of Mashash, there were very serious claims. It’s a fact that in the end he was fired.”
In response to Saada’s claim that Nitzan wrote an email in which he refused to come out against Commissioner Elshich because of the Netanyahu cases, Nitzan said: “I backed up MHS, but when the head of MHS wanted me to go out in the media against the Commissioner – I said it was not my way.” Nitzan added that “the Commissioner conducted himself in a scandalous manner, but that does not mean that I will enter into a public conflict against the Commissioner. The Audit Commissioner for the Prosecutor’s Office explicitly stated that there is no connection between these sentences I wrote in the email and the Netanyahu case.”
The former state attorney referred to Saada’s claims that the investigation of the incident in Umm al-Khiran in 2017, in which the policeman Erez Levy and local resident Yaqub Abu Al-Qian were killed, was completely disrupted. “I have no ability to determine based on the evidence that Yaqoob Alkeyan is innocent,” said Nitzan. “As far as I’m concerned, every person is innocent, but if you ask me according to the evidence, if it can be determined that he is a terrorist, there is evidence here and there.”
“I didn’t know about the exercise to shoot an object in real time,” said Nitzan. “This story illustrates that it is easy to blame the public. He is a liar and vindictive and acts out of personal interests,” he concluded.