Then Yaakov and Nechama Rubovich were told that the British had received secret information that their son was confirmed dead. This did not calm the storm; the local Jewish papers demanded to know who killed the boy and the location of his body. They demanded to know how Rubovich could have been killed with no trial, and why the British had lied about Farran from the beginning.
The national poet Nathan Alterman published a poem called “Where is the Boy” in the Davar newspaper. The New York Times and the Herald Tribune picked up the story and pressured the British government for answers. In the British Parliament there were calls for a trial. The international pressure finally forced a trial, but the court acquitted Farran claiming “lack of evidence”.
After the trail, Farran was immediately sent to England. Lehi attempted to take revenge on Farran in May 1948. A letter bomb was mailed to his home, and his younger brother Rex was killed opening the package. Farran moved to Canada.
Many credit the murder of Alexander Rubovich as one of the factors that helped end British rule in Palestine by bringing international attention to the situation in Palestine.
Fifty seven years after Rubovich’s murder, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported in September 2nd 2004, that documents from 1947 were recently uncovered in Britain in a file in the Colonial Office.
One of the files (# CO537/2302) included a police document containing a summary of Colonel Bernard Ferguson’s (Assistant Commander for Special Operations against Terror in Palestine) role in the Rubovich affair.
According to Ferguson’s summary, he stated that Roy Farran came to him on May 7th 1947 and informed him that he (Farran) and a British Police team on the previous evening, were on a look-out mission in Jerusalem for people handing out illegal pamphlets. Farran reported that they had stopped a youth (Rubovich), with Lehi pamphlets in his possession.
Farran also told Ferguson that they took the boy in a car for further “investigation” on the road leading down to Jericho, but they went “too far in their efforts to force the boy to talk”.
Ferguson, in is summary stated that Farran killed the youth. The body was stripped, the clothes burned, and Rubovich’s body was dumped in an open area next to the Jerusalem-Jericho road. The body was never found.
Ferguson’s summary also states that he passed this information on to Arthur Giles Assistant Police Commissioner and the Police Commissioner himself. His report was suppressed and was not accepted as evidence in the murder trial against Farran.
Farran never admitted to the killing of Rubovitch.
Sixty years later, in February 2006, Roy Farran died in Canada at the age of 85. Two weeks after his death, a renewed call for the whereabouts of the boy’s body, and a demand by his family for a Jewish burial was put out in the Israeli press.