Israel’s ‘jackal’: Was Prisoner X an Australian Mossad agent?

A prisoner who hanged himself in an Israeli jail in 2010 may have been an Australian national working for the Israeli spy agency Mossad, a report by ABC News has revealed.

The man was identified in the ABC report as Ben Zygier.

An article appeared in Ha’aretz newspaper on Tuesday saying Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had called an emergency meeting of media chiefs to deal with "information pertaining to an incident that is very embarrassing to a certain government agency."

But the Ha’aretz article was quickly removed from the Ha’aretz website and no official comment was released.

Zygier’s body was found hanged in his cell at Ayalon high-security prison in Ramle, central Israel, in 2010 and subsequently flown back to Melbourne for burial, according to reports.

According to the ABC report, Prisoner X was held in a maximum-security solitary confinement wing of the prison, which was built to house Yigal Amir, the assassin of former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. He was found hangd in a room fitted with surveilance equipment designed to prevent suicide.

Zygier, known as Ben Alon in Israel, moved to the Jewish state when he was 24, ten years before his death. He had an Israeli wife and two children.