Shalom Nagar, the Israeli prison guard who was chosen at random and against his will to hang Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, died on Tuesday at the age of 88.

He carried out the first and only death sentence ever imposed by the State of Israel, writes The Times of Israel.

The execution took place in the early morning hours of June 1, 1962. The Israeli authorities remained silent on the details of the execution, and a brief news report of the execution was broadcast on the Voice of Israel radio station.

However, in 1992, while searching for material for a report marking the 30th anniversary of the execution, the radio station came across Nagar's name.

Nagar gave numerous media interviews in the following years, describing the six months he spent monitoring Eichmann during the trial. Nagar was born in Yemen in 1936 and arrived in Israel at the age of 12 as an orphan. He served in the IDF Parachute Brigade and later joined the Israel Prison Service.

Eichmann, a key architect of the Nazi Final Solution, went into hiding after World War II and was captured by Israeli intelligence in Argentina in May 1960 and put on trial in Jerusalem for his role in the mass murder of six million Jews. He was sentenced to death.