This story involves many of our most valued myths. There are in this tale
many questions for which I have no answers. Anyone interested enough to
read this story I ask that they correct and openly critique the story.
Individual passages are identified as to source complete references will
included at the end of the tale. How much is true, how much is fiction?
Hopefully the discussion group will correct and amplify this tale. Perhaps
we will find boring reality at the end.
There persists a profound passion that the Templars still exist as a
functioning body in the modern world. The romance of the Templars definitely
keeps a ferocious hold on the minds of significant numbers of people who
have continued to hand them down through the centuries.
14 April 1998 customs officials at Ben Gurion Airport on his way out of the
country stopped Alisdair Sinclair, aged 47 after five or six day stay in the
country. He had 9000 Deutsche marks, then about £3,500, in a false bottom of
a handbag. He was arrested without charge. The police thought the false
bottom suggested something illegal though hiding of money is a legitimate
means of discomforting theft. Alisdair Sinclair hadn't aroused suspicions on
his way into the country, police say. But they now thought the suitcase
might have been used to smuggle in contraband and that the marks were the
compensation.
Fifteen hours later at the airport police station, Alisdair Sinclair was
found purportedly strangled on his shoelaces. He was taken to hospital and
died. Police say he could not find a way to hang himself from the ceiling,
and instead looped his shoelaces and T-shirt around a towel bar about three
feet off the ground and slipped the improvised noose around his neck. From a
squatting position, they hypothesize, he repeatedly threw his bodyweight
downward, choking himself
Strong set of shoelaces weren't they?
Alisdair Sinclair, described by his brother James, or Robert depending on
who write the story, as a "gregarious man who loved to travel and had
friends all over the world," was found unconscious and near death by
strangulation in a police cell. The police report it was an attempted
suicide.
Alisdair Sinclair, the hospital's associate director Dr. Yigal Halperin says
suffered irreversible brain damage. Alisdair Roslyn Sinclair died at 7 p.m.
on 15 April 1998. His corpse was transferred to the Institute for Forensic
Medicine at Abu Kabir for an autopsy. The autopsy concluded that Alisdair
Rosslyn Sinclair had killed himself.
The police contacted the British Embassy in Tel Aviv and asked for
assistance in locating family members. Alisdair Sinclair was unmarried, his
parents dead and he had been living a rather nomadic life in Amsterdam
dealing in guitars and playing them at local pubs. It took three days to
track down his family in Selkirk, Scotland. The family was informed of the
death and told they had three weeks to come up with about £3,000 to fly
Alisdair Sinclair's corpse home. James (Robert) says the Israelis seemed to
be pushing a different option: burying Alisdair Rosslyn Sinclair in a
Christian cemetery in Israel, at a cost of about £900. . The family wanted
him buried in Scotland and paid the £3,000 to fly the corpse home Reported
The Jerusalem Post 30 October 1998, by-lined Netty C. Gross.
British records indicate that Israeli police also "informally made a request
for an organ donation." The police deny ever making such a request. Jewish
traditions don't usually separate body parts or organs from corpses.
On 13 May the University of Glasgow autopsied the body again. The hyoid bone
at the base of the tongue was gone and so was the heart. Why the hyoid bone
gone? The missing bone would have revealed if Alisdair Sinclair hung himself
or was strangled by other means.
Is a new Templar legend making the rounds supported and refuted, asking many
questions and answering few? That is the tendency of Templar legends. There
is always a basis for these stories, a scintilla of evidence. The stories
all indicate that there has been a strenuous effort by government, police,
state or church to repress and conceal the truth. Even if parts were true of
this story, one thing always smoulders, official repression. Someone has
repressed the story, amended it, disclaimed it, proven it, disproved it and
in short created a conspiracy.
Where was his heart?
"According to Alisdair's brother James (Robert), family tradition has it
that the Sinclairs are descended from the crusading Knights Templars, who
journeyed to Jerusalem in the mid-1300s in search of holy artefacts from
Herod's Temple to bring back to Scottish hero Robert Bruce. Alisdair
himself, says James, was particularly proud of his middle name, Roslyn, the
name of the chapel in Scotland whose floor plan, is said to be based, on
Herod's Temple. James mentions these details in attempting to reconstruct
his brother's motive for travelling to Israel."
The Alisdair's Sinclair family looked into Alisdair's recent life and none
of his friends thought him suicidal. No one understood why he was arrested
for carrying perfectly legal currency in the first place.
Israel police explained that they suspected he was a drug dealer and under
interrogation he admitted to have smuggled in thousands of Ecstasy pills the
week before. Alisdair's brother James (Robert) mocked the police version,
noting correctly, that since he wasn't caught with drugs, he had no reason
whatsoever to confess to the supposed crime.
A British government Tel Aviv embassy official Suad Andraus was fuming,
stating, "People don't just die in lockup."
British authorities demanded an explanation where the heart was and it's
immediate return.
The Israelis explained that as a drug smuggling suspect, the heart would
have shown "signs of long-term drug abuse." "It's true we didn't inform the
family in Scotland that the heart was missing. Frankly, we didn't want to
upset them."
The Israelis never released the results of any heart tests, if in fact they
carried out any.
Returning the cadaver of a man who had died in police custody under
mysterious circumstances without a heart would be considered by some to be a
wee bit distressing.
The Israelis met a second demand for Alistair's heart and turned over a
heart to the Sinclair family. The family demanded DNA proof that this was
Alistair's heart but the Israelis refused, citing the £4,000 cost of the
test. Alistair Sinclair's family found the cost prohibitive, British
authorities did not press the issue or conduct their own tests.
A frustrated brother expressed his disgust with the inconsistencies of his
brother's weird demise
Alisdair had no police record and is it probable that he would turn to drug
smuggling? Brother James (Robert) repeats, "Why would he admit to anything
if his bloody suitcase was empty? My brother was an intelligent, well read
man. He wasn't daft."
The plot thickens an unexpected motive for the whole affair was published in
the Jerusalem Report, an Israeli news magazine.
Sinclair
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