A hit squad planning to kill him and escape would have had difficulty keeping up with the changes to his plans.That is not to say Maxwell was not concerned about his safety; he was. The Lady Ghislaine had security cameras at key points and the crew were under orders to keep watch on the gangplank when in port At night the radar scanned for any vessels approaching. If he was murdered, the assassin or assassins would have had to get aboard, force him into the sea and escape – all without anyone hearing or seeing If it was an inside job, again there was no sign. The crew were interviewed by an examining magistrate in Tenerife, Isabel Oliva, who found nothing suspicious. Two forensic examinations revealed no puncture marks on his body. There was some slight bruising, but nothing to indicate an assault.If he was murdered, who would have done it? Speculation, much of it on the internet, centres on rogue elements in MI6 or the Israelis Both theories are the stuff of the most lurid novels. Among the more sober details is the fact that, six weeks before he died, Maxwell was visited by the late Andrei Loukanov, the former communist prime minister of Bulgaria and one of the publisher's closest Eastern European associates.

Loukanov had access to Bulgarian secret service files on the killing in London in 1978 of Georgi Markov, who was injected with poison, possibly from the tip of an adapted umbrella. According to rumours that refuse to go away, the Bulgarian files contained evidence linking the Markov murder with MI6. His assassination was planned by an agent working for both MI6 and the Bulgarians. The details of the Markov murder were contained in tapes and documents held by Bulgarian security. In later years, this rumour has it, MI6 made strenuous attempts to cover its tracks, including paying a Bulgarian official £50,000 to have the archive destroyed.Loukanov is reputed to have copied the file and, so the story goes, delivered it as a favour to Maxwell, who subsequently kept it with him at all times. Terrified that he was going to pass the documents and tapes to journalists on his own paper, the Daily Mirror, MI6 agents are supposed to have tracked him to the Lady Ghislaine, forced him to open the safe and hand them over, and then forced him over the side.The Mossad theory is equally lurid.

This casts Maxwell as the keeper of Israel's dirty secrets, the Western "Mr Fixit" who disguised the funding of the country's top secret and diplomatically hypersensitive nuclear weapons programme through his businesses, and as a money launderer and arms buyer. Alarmed that Maxwell, whose behaviour had become erratic and who was desperate for cash, might be about to blow their cover, the Israelis silenced him.Fantasy? Probably. Yet Maxwell is known to have made at least one vital contribution to Israel's nuclear industry. In 1986, the Sunday Mirror was approached with the inside story of Israel's Dimona nuclear weapons facility by an Israeli, Mordecai Vanunu, who had worked there.

Maxwell took an obsessive interest in the story, working closely with the Israelis to rubbish the story and ordering staff to take Vanunu's pictures and documents to the Israeli embassy in London. Vanunu was later kidnapped by the Israelis, returned home and sent to jail, where he has been, mostly in solitary confinement, ever since.Maxwell's betrayal surfaced shortly before he died, in October 1991, in a book by the American journalist Seymour Hersh. Maxwell's response to Hersh's The Samson Option was typical: he issued a writ But this time his opponents did not back off. Hersh's claims were aired under privilege in the House of Commons, giving the green light to the media to repeat them. In interviews, Hersh went further, throwing in allegations of arms dealing.Yet if Mossad really was afraid that Maxwell knew too much, what are we to make of the Israeli government's behaviour after his death? Maxwell was accorded the next best thing to a state funeral, with President Chaim Herzog intoning over his corpse as it lay in Israel's Hall of the Nation: "He scaled the heights Kings and barons besieged his doorstep He was a figure of almost mythological stature. An actor on the world stage, bestriding the globe, as Shakespeare says, like a colossus." At his graveside on the Mount of Olives stood Herzog, Yitzhak Shamir, Ariel Sharon and Shimon Peres, to name a few of the country's most powerful figures. For some, the turnout and Herzog's words testified that Maxwell had been a faithful servant to Israel in the darker recesses of power and arms.Herzog's tribute was incredible, not only for the hyperbolic language but also for what it omitted The Israeli president was not alone, however.

World leaders, including John Major, George Bush, Fran?s Mitterrand and Boris Yeltsin queued up to sing his praises. His own paper did him proud, glorying in his life and achievements, hailing him as "the man who saved the Mirror". The night he died, Alastair Campbell, now Tony Blair's press spokesman, then the Mirror's political editor, was famously involved in a brawl with his opposite number at The Guardian, who had dared to mock Maxwell's demise.Not everyone's verdict was so dewy-eyed This newspaper's judgement was scathing. Maxwell was a "a liar, a cheat and a bully" who had done "more than any other individual to pervert the British law of libel", The Independent wrote.