Tel Aviv police “invented” a machine proving to a suspect that, contrary to his claims, he remembered all that happened the night of the murder.

The Tel Aviv Police Department “invented” a new machine that seemed likely to change the face of criminal interrogations – but it will apparently not be used more than once.

The contraption was called a “memory machine,” and was used to persuade a murder suspect that, contrary to his impassioned and repeated claims, he in fact did remember what happened the night of the murder.

Maariv/NRG reports that the story began two weeks ago, when the body of Andrei Shalhov was found outside his home in the central Israel city of Yahud. His neighbor Andrei Polokhin, 47, was arrested, after it was learned that the two had gotten into a fight, which ended with the stabbing death of Shalhov.

The investigation was entrusted to the Dan Region Police, headed by Superintendent Itzik Kumriel. Polokhin refused to cooperate, claiming he was drunk at the time and doesn’t remember a thing.

One of the detectives then had an idea. He rushed to nearby Tel HaShomer Hospital and requisitioned an ECG machine used to check cardiac activity, together with the printout of the annual ECG exam performed on one of the detectives the day before.

The detective then summoned Polokhin for a “memory test.” The suspect did not object, and the detective attached several electrodes to his head and chest, other wires to a laptop computer, and began asking questions. Polokhin continued to maintain that he did not remember, and finally, at the end of the “exam,” the detective told him, “You’re lying! The exam shows that the memory in your head is full and that you do remember!” He showed him the printout as proof – and the suspect, faced with the “evidence,” could do nothing but confess that he did, in fact, remember everything and that he killed his neighbor.

Polokhin then reviewed the events of that night in detail, and later reenacted the killing itself.

The police later explained to him that in actuality there was no such thing as a “memory machine” – though they did have to include the ECG printout as part of the “investigation material” in the file they submitted to the court.