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Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak
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| By israelinsider staff April 17, 2007 |
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Egyptian authorities have accused another of its citizens of spying for Israel, charging that nuclear engineer Mohammed Sayed Saber Ali has passed classified intelligence to Israel's Mossad.
Israeli officials denied the accusations, citing their lack of a valid basis, Army Radio reported.
State security prosecutor, Hisham Badawi, said that Ali, 35, had given Israeli Mossad agents classified Atomic Energy Agency documents in exchange for $17,000, and that his two Israeli contacts, one with Irish and one with Japanese citizenship, were also wanted but have not yet been found.
The Egyptian government issued a statement identifying the two contacts as Brian Peter and Shiro Izo, who met Ali, a worker at the Egyptian Inshas reactor, in Hong Kong between 2004 and 2006, where they asked him to work for their business from inside the Atomic Energy Agency.
The statement went on to say that after one of his meetings with the contacts, Ali understood their business to be a " front for the activity of Israeli intelligence."
The statement alluded to several meeting in Hong Kong, where Ali gave in classified documents and intelligence to the contacts, who were interested in the Inshas reactor's abilities, any technical problems the reactor had and their causes, which experiments it was being used for and how often the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspected it.
According to reports, the contacts supplied Ali with a laptop which he used to acquire classified documents by uploading spy software onto Atomic Energy Agency's computers.
It is unknown which information Ali allegedly passed to Israeli agents.
Egyptian Minister of Electricity and Energy Hassan Yunis recently announced a possible plan to build a nuclear power plant, along with the small research atomic reactor it already has. The plan, which includes a 1,000-megawatt nuclear power plant at Al-Dabaa, is the first since the idea was abandoned after the 1986 nuclear disaster in Chernobyl.
This is Egypt's second recent espionage accusation. Mohammed el-Attar, who also holds Canadian citizenship, was charged in January of spying for Israel. Three Israelis who were charged in connection to the case have not been located.
In 2002, Egyptian engineer Sherif al-Filali, was found guilty by an Egyptian court of spying for Israel and was sentenced to 15 years in prison with hard labor.
In 2004, Israeli Arab business man convicted of spying, Azzam Azzam, was freed by Egypt after serving eight years, in exchange for the release of six Egyptian students by Israel. |
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