Shlomo Filber in a huge lawsuit against the state: serious harassment and torture

February 2, 2025   

Shlomo Filber, former Director General of the Ministry of Communications and a close associate of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who was later recruited as a state witness against him - filed a huge lawsuit today (Sunday) in the amount of 10 million shekels against the State of Israel, the Israel Police, as well as a personal lawsuit against senior officials in the enforcement and investigation system. This is due to the abuse that culminated in the commission of a sodomy act during the arrest and investigation - at the end of which he signed an agreement to become a state witness in Case 4000. Following the lawsuit - which was first reported by Moti Castel on Channel 14 - Filber retracts his confession and says that the confession was extracted from him under torture. The lawsuit includes a personal lawsuit against former Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit, former State Attorney Shai Nitzan, and attorneys Liat Ben Ari and Yehudit Tirosh, the plaintiffs in Case 4000, as well as against members of the investigation team who were partners in the abuse and interrogation exercises that were planned in advance, in order to get Filber to sign an agreement. State witness and even changed his testimony as previously given. The shocking indictment reveals for the first time the cruel and illegal interrogation procedures that Filber underwent in the 60 hours prior to his signing of the state witness agreement, and an interrogation exercise that simulated "the experience of a prisoner in prison," which was decided to be given to him after he expressed his willingness to discuss a state witness agreement, an exercise that included sleep deprivation, prolonged overnight trips between different prisons, while falsely presenting a search for a detention center that could accommodate him, and culminating in an incident of sexual assault and sodomy by a guard during his reception at 2:00 a.m. in Hadarim Prison, when the entire prison staff was there in full uniform, awaiting the detainee's arrival. These actions - according to the indictment - were carried out immediately after a meeting convened at the Ministry of Justice in light of Filber's proposal to formulate an agreement regarding his testimony, with the participation of former Attorney General Mandelblit, former State Attorney Nitzan, Ben Ari and Tirosh, the heads of the National Unit for Combating Economic Crime of the Israel Police, including Chief of Staff Eli Assayag and Chief of Staff Yoav Telem, as well as Tzipi Gez, who was the director of the Investigations Department at the Securities Authority and currently serves as a judge. Telem and Gez were the heads of the TCM. The indictment also describes the first two days of detention preceding that night of terror, which began with Filber's humiliating arrest on February 18, 2018, in the early morning hours in front of his young children, when his wife had already left for work - and included the confiscation of equipment, phones and computers, and describes the aggressive interrogation that Filber underwent during the first two days of detention, which included, among other things, "insults, shouting, including the outburst of investigator Udi Aboukis who quite explicitly slammed the prosecutor: 'Say it's Bibi!', and includes an explicit statement - which later turned out to be false - by two investigating officers: "You are involved in one of the most serious bribery cases in the country, which has been going on for three years and we have mountains of evidence." The indictment describes Filber's difficult mental and physical condition on the day of signing the state witness agreement, "when at this stage he was in a state of severe fatigue - over 50 hours awake, including a few hours of broken sleep in difficult conditions as a 'prisoner' on whom a humiliating and shocking act of sodomy was committed", how the investigation team exploited this situation to continue abuse and aggressive pressure, and how these investigative actions were concealed by "staging a 'power outage' event, during critical moments in the investigation related to the circumstances of the plaintiff's signing the state witness agreement". The lawsuit describes the moments of Filber's signing of the state agreement "as a final chord to the abusive and contemptible process, on the night between February 20, 2018 and February 21, 2018, after nearly 60 hours of almost no sleep, and without the plaintiff being given time to sit separately on the draft state witness agreement with his lawyers. A 'ceremony' was held at midnight in which defendant 10, Yoav Telem, read to the plaintiff the agreement that was drafted and prepared by the defendants, clause by clause, and finally after midnight the plaintiff signed the state witness agreement." Under these circumstances, Attorneys Lior Shavit and Itai Roth, who represent Filber, state: "The plaintiff's signature on a state witness agreement in the extreme circumstances described, as well as the state witness agreement itself (which the state is seeking to annul today), are as worthless as garlic peel and are null and void as a gravestone, 'void and void, neither valid nor enforceable'.".