Death plunge of Egyptian billionaire who 'spied for Israel'

[karlos]

Death plunge of Egyptian billionaire who 'spied for Israel'
By CHARLOTTE GILL

An Egyptian billionaire who feared for his life after he was accused of being an Israeli double agent has been found dead outside his London flat. Ashraf Marwan, son-in-law of Egypt's late President Nasser, was named three years ago by Israeli officials as a source for the country's intelligence service Mossad.

Scotland Yard are treating the 62-year-old's death as "unexplained".
It is thought he fell from a window balcony in his fourth-floor flat on Wednesday afternoon. Mr Marwan, who was married to Mr Nasser's daughter Mona, was a former shareholder in Chelsea Football Club and had lived in the UK for 25 years after retiring from Egyptian government service in the late 1970s.

His widow was due to arrive in the UK from Egypt yesterday. It is understood that Mr Marwan's death is not being treated as suspicious, but it will prompt a host of conspiracy theories in the Middle East. Officers are believed to be contacting his GP after it was suggested that he had recently been diagnosed with a serious illness. Some members of London's Arab community think he may have committed suicide.

Essam Abdel Samad, the head of the Union of Egyptians in Europe, said he had spoken to Mr Marwan's maid, who said she was the only other person in the flat in the exclusive St James's area in Central London. "She said she was working in the kitchen and he was in his office and the first thing she knew was when someone came to the door and said he had fallen," Mr Samad told an Egyptian TV station.

Egypt's MENA news agency quoted a source close to the family as saying Mr Marwan suffered from balance problems recently and had been using a cane.
pull the other one talk about lies why is it everyone they bump off commits suicide surely they have to try a new angle

"A friend who is a member of the Egyptian expatriate community in Britain was on his way to visit him and saw him on the balcony talking on his mobile phone. Then he saw him fall after he lost his balance," the source said. Mr Marwan voiced concerns that he would be assassinated after he was accused of being an agent during the Yom Kippur war. The son of a military officer in Nasser's presidential guard, he joined the Egyptian army after gaining a degree in chemical engineering. He later worked as an assistant to Nasser and after his death in 1970, became a political and security adviser to his successor Anwar Sadat. In the 1970s, Mr Marwan was head of Egypt's military industry complex before retiring and moving to the UK.

Israeli media claimed that on the eve of the war in October 1973, Mr Marwan told Mossad that Egypt and Syria were about to attack Israel.

Mr Marwan reportedly first walked into the Israeli embassy in London in 1969 and volunteered to give information but was turned down. He was later recruited by Mossad. Military historian Gad Shimron, a former Mossad officer, said: "We know now, from testimony given by Israeli spymasters and made public years after the Yom Kippur war that Marwan was the man who tipped off the Mossad." He said Mr Marwan gave the warning just hours before the Egyptian attacks on Israeli force on the east bank of the Suez canal but Israel decided not to order a mobilisation.

He added: "Later, the chief of Israeli military intelligence justified the inaction by saying Marwan was suspected of being a double agent planted by the Egyptians." Mr Marwan was identified as an agent in the book Eve of Destruction by Vanity Fair writer Harold Bloom.

His death will shock some of Britain's wealthiest community.
His associates included former Chelsea chairman Ken Bates, arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, the late Tiny Rowland and Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi.

Wow, what a plot! And what a bad guy too. Maybe one day they will reveal Arafat also worked for Mossad which i have always suspected too.

[conspiracy analyst]

[karlos]

One young Egyptian blogger wrote Friday there 'must be something very appealing about a London balcony which tempts famous Egyptians to throw themselves off it.'

Six years ago - also in June - the famous Egyptian actress Soaud Hosni allegedly threw herself off the balcony of a residential tower in Maida Vale, North London.

In the mid-1970s, Leithy Nassif, the former head of the presidential guard under the late Egyptian president Anwar Sadatthe threw himself off a balcony in the very same tower in Maida Vale.

The common link between the three is that they all had intelligence links and were rumoured to have been writing their memoirs at the time of their alleged suicides.

Nassif had helped Sadat stage his palace coup following the death of his predecessor Gamal Abdel-Nasser, when Sadat arrested all Nasser's men in 1971.

Souad Hosni, the idol of Arab cinema, was allegedly employed by the Egyptian intelligence in the 1960s, something which had continued to ruin her reputation after the fall of those who supported her.

Her last 10 years were spent in London, where she suffered deep depression and impoverishment. Thus, at the time of her death in 2001, it was said, she was considering finding a publisher for her memoirs to raise money.

Then came the death of Ashraf Marwan this week, which prompted every Egyptian media outlet Thursday and Friday to revisit all conspiracy theories concerning the death of Egyptians in London.

Marwan's career and connections represent a feast for anyone interested in conspiracy theories.

Having married Nasser's daughter shortly before the late Egyptian president died in 1970, he became President Sadat's personal political aide in the early 1970s, and later head of Egypt's Military Industry Organization before moving to London in the 1980s where he became a billionaire.

In 2004, retired major general Eli Zeira, head of military intelligence during the Yom Kippur War, had alleged that Marwan was recruited by Israeli intelligence, Mossad, a year before Nasser died.

Zeira claimed that while he was a close associate of Sadat, Marwan continued to provide Israel with information well after the Yom Kippur War in 1973.

As if espionage for Mossad was not enough, Marwan's name was also linked with claims of illicit weapons trading in the Middle East. He was also rumoured to be a close associate of the maverick Mohamed al- Fayad, owner of Harrods and father of Dodi, Princess Diana's companion who died with her in a car crash in Paris.

Marwan was said to be the principal player in the Tiny Rowland versus al-Fayed war over the House of Fraser which owned Harrods.

In his book Who Killed Diana? Simon Regan an investigative journalist and author of biographies of Prince Charles and Princess Margaret, dedicated a special chapter of his book to Marwan.

Regan says: 'Cold journalistic logic brings one to the inevitable conclusion that Ashraf Marwan made the most perfect double agent for nearly all of the Mid-eastern and Western espionage agencies.

The 'strong circumstantial evidence is that Marwan could not possibly have moved freely in London or Paris (in the particular activities he was known to be engaged in) unless he enjoyed absolute immunity, or, at the very least, official protection,' he says.


© 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur

[karlos]

Egyptian Dictator Hosni Mubarak on Monday broke the official silence surrounding an alleged double agent who died mysteriously in London close to the Haymarket scene of the alleged car bomb last week, saying he was a patriot but refusing to reveal more.

Mubarak was quoted as saying: "Ashraf Marwan was a loyal patriot." He was quoted the day after the billionaire son-in-law of former Egyptian president Gamel Abdel Nasser was laid to rest in Cairo.

pull the other one

[Mark Gobell]

Mossad agents murdered my husband, says widow of billionaire arms dealer

In 2007, Ashraf Marwan fell to his death from his balcony in London. Mona Nasser explains why she is sure he was pushed

* Rajeev Syal
* The Observer, Sunday 11 July 2010


He was accused of being both an Israeli spy and an Egyptian double agent. Three years after his death, Ashraf Marwan's career and mysterious death in London remain among the most intriguing unsolved riddles of modern espionage.

The billionaire arms dealer, who was the son-in-law of Egypt's second president, fell to his death from a fifth-floor West End balcony on a summer's day in 2007. His death in the heart of wealthy London made world headlines.

An inquest this week will attempt finally to unravel the circumstances of Marwan's fatal fall. In an exclusive interview, his widow has told the Observer that in the days before he died her husband believed his life was in danger. After Marwan died, his family discovered that the draft manuscript of his memoirs – which threatened to expose secrets of the Middle East's intelligence agencies – had disappeared from his bookshelf.

Mona Nasser, Marwan's wife of 40 years and one of two daughters of the former Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, said that her husband confided that he was being pursued by assassins nine days before his death. She believes he was killed by the Mossad, Israel's intelligence agency, and is expected to be a witness at the coroner's inquest that opens on Monday.

Nasser has also criticised the investigation by the Metropolitan Police into Marwan's death as negligent. The shoes that Marwan was wearing when he died – which may have provided vital DNA evidence to show whether he was murdered or jumped – were lost by investigating officers.

Since his death, there has been intense speculation over the secretive life of Marwan and his role in the Yom Kippur war, waged between Israel and a coalition of Arab states backing Egypt and Syria in 1973. Mossad agents say Marwan was their heroic spy at the heart of the Egyptian government. But both Hosni Mubarak, Egypt's current president, and the former head of Israeli military intelligence have indicated that Marwan was a double agent feeding misinformation to the Israelis.

Marwan, 63, was found dead in June 2007 on the pavement beneath his exclusive Carlton House Terrace flat, a stone's throw from Trafalgar Square. At least one witness claims to have seen two men of Middle Eastern appearance on his fifth-floor balcony seconds after he fell.

Nasser, speaking from her home in Cairo, said that Marwan told her three times in the four years before he died that his life was in peril. The last time he did so, they were alone together in their London flat. "He turned to me and said: 'My life is in danger. I might be killed. I have a lot of different enemies.' He knew they were coming after him. He was killed by Mossad," she said.

Those fears were at their most intense just days after an Israeli court ruled that Major-General Eli Zeira, who headed Israeli military intelligence during the 1973 war, had exposed Marwan's identity as an Israeli spy. "I was worried, of course, but in our life together we had been in many dangerous situations. He was determined to carry on as normal," she said.

Nasser met Marwan, a tall, handsome chemist, in August 1965 in Cairo, where they were both students. He was, she said, charming and quietly spoken. They were married the following year. He soon began working closely with her father. "My father would send my husband to missions in foreign countries. My husband refused to give me sensitive information about his trips because that would have put me in danger," she said.

Speaking of her husband's alleged role in the Yom Kippur war, Nasser said that she confronted her husband in 2003 but he had denied that he had any direct contact with Mossad agents.

However, since Marwan's death Nasser said she had learned from Egyptian intelligence officers that he did have a role in feeding Mossad with false information. She still does not feel as if he lied to her. "My husband was a hero who served his country. He only did what was asked of him to perfection," she said.

After Anwar Sadat, who had succeeded Nasser as president in 1970, was assassinated in 1981, Marwan and his family moved to London.

Nasser said that the police investigation following her husband's death had been a sham. "The investigation was extremely negligent. They did not seal the area properly. They did not take fingerprints. They lost the shoes he was wearing when died. This was all vital information," she said.

The shoes may have carried clues as to how he died, because he suffered from neuropathy in his feet. This meant that he could not lift them higher than a few inches without help. "If he was supposed to have climbed over a metre-high balcony rail, there would have been scuff marks," she said.

A police spokesman said that the three-year investigation into Marwan's death, which was removed from one set of detectives and handed to the Specialist Crime Directorate after Marwan's shoes were lost, continues.

The coroner's inquest has been scheduled to last for at least three days, and is expected to hear testimony from police officers and from former business partners of Marwan.

On the day that Marwan died, he had been working hard on his memoirs of his role in the 1970s, according to family members. His wife said the lock on the front door had been left on the latch by one of their household staff. A housekeeper in the flat was the only other person present in the 15-room apartment, giving an intruder ample time to find Marwan and kill him, she claimed.

"I believe that the intruders took him to the bedroom, they hit him and they threw him out of the window over the balcony. Someone on a fourth-floor balcony who gave evidence to the police heard him scream before he fell. Do people committing suicide scream before they fall?" she said.

Nasser said that the couple had been looking forward to holidays with their five grandchildren, and had made many plans for the long and short term.

"He was happy. We were happy. There is no way he killed himself. It is so painful to think about one's husband being thrown over a balcony. It is so horrible. I am talking about it for the first time because the truth should come out," she said.

The Observer

[TonyGosling]

Probe into death of Egyptian 'spy' inconclusive
(AFP) – Wednesday
LONDON — An inquest into the mysterious death in London of an Egyptian businessman accused of spying for Israel who plunged from the balcony of his home reached an inconclusive verdict Wednesday.
Ashraf Marwan, 63, the son-in-law of the late Egyptian president Gamel Abdel Nasser and a suspected double agent, was found dead in 2007 after falling from a balcony in the plush Saint James's district of central London.
His wife Mona, Nasser's daughter, said her husband had spoken of his fears that he would be "killed by my enemies" the last time she saw him alive.
But coroner William Dolman at Westminster Coroner's Court in London recorded an open verdict in the case.
This means there was insufficient evidence for any other possible verdict, which could have included unlawful killing or suicide.
Speaking after the hearing, Marwan's wife said she believed he had been murdered, adding: "The truth will come out. They are still discovering things about Tutankhamun."
She has previously been quoted as saying she believes he was killed by Israeli spy agency Mossad.
Allegations of spying by Marwan centred on the period around the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
Inquests are held in England and Wales into violent, unnatural or sudden deaths.