He was accused of being both an Israeli spy and an Egyptian double agent.
Two 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 balcony on a summer’s day in 2007. His death in the heart of London’s wealthy West End made headlines around the world.
An inquest this week will attempt finally to unravel the circumstances of Marwan’s fatal fall.
His widow says that in the days before he died her husband believed his life to have been 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 former Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, said 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 Wednesday.
Nasser has also criticised the investigation by London’s 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 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 apartment, 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 Marwan told her three times in the four years before he died that his life was in peril. “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.
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.
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