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Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak (photo: US State Department)
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| By israelinsider staff April 18, 2007 |
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The Egyptian nuclear engineer charged with spying for Israel has confessed, the Egyptian state-run daily al-Ahram reported.
According to the newspaper, Muhammad Sayed Saber gave a complete confession, including details of his alleged contacts in Hong Kong with two Mossad agents who were his alleged operators.
Saber was arrested on February 18 by the Egyptian police upon his return to Cairo from Hong Kong, where he had been meeting with the two agents since 2004. The agents, an Irish citizen named Brian Peter and a Japanese citizen named Shiru Itzu, who had not been located yet, work for a company which specializes in space research, the paper said.
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.
According to sources in Cairo, Saber received a BA in nuclear engineering from Alexandria University in 1994 and a diploma in nuclear reactor physics from Cairo University in 1999. In the meantime, he had begun working for the Atomic Energy Agency and in 1999 Saber went to the Israeli embassy in Cairo to apply for a grant to study nuclear engineering in an Israeli university.
This move was seen as suspicious, Egyptian security officials reported, and they told Saber not to go to the Israeli embassy without first receiving permission from his superiors at the Atomic Energy Agency. |
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