Last update - 00:00 17/04/2007
Israel rejects 'baseless' Egyptian claims of nuclear espionage
By Barak Ravid, Haaretz Correspondent, Haaretz Service and Agencies
Israel on Tuesday rejected as baseless claims by Egypt that it had recruited a nuclear engineer at the Egyptian Atomic Energy Agency to spy on the country's atomic program.
The engineer has been charged with spying for Israel, Egyptian officials said, adding that he had received software to hack into the Agency's computers.
The Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem dismissed the accusations, saying that this was not the first time that Egypt had made such claims.
"To Israel's sorrow, we hear from time to time stories like this from Cairo, and it ultimately becomes clear that they are preposterous and baseless," Army Radio quoted the Foreign Ministry as saying.
"It is a shame that such reports appear with such frequency in Egypt," the ministry said in a statement later Tuesday.
The suspect was named as 35-year-old Mohammed Sayed Saber Ali, who works at the Inshas reactor. Egyptian state security prosecutor Hisham Badawi said that two foreigners, one Japanese and one Irish, were also wanted in connection with the case but remained at large.
Badawi said Ali stole important documents from the Atomic Energy Agency and passed them on to agents of Israel's Mossad intelligence service in return for $17,000. Ali first met the two foreigners in Hong Kong between 2004 and 2006, Badawi said.
A statement by the Egyptian government named the Irishman as Brian Peter and the Japanese man as Shiro Izo. They told Ali at one meeting in Hong Kong that they wanted him to work for their company from inside the Atomic Energy Agency, it said.
"The first accused [Ali] said that he understood from the course of this meeting that the company referred to was no more than a front for the activity of Israeli intelligence," it said.
At a later meeting in Hong Kong in December 2006, Ali gave Peter documents containing secret information about the Atomic Energy Agency and the nuclear reactor at Inshas, it said.
During his final trip to Hong Kong, in February 2007, Israeli intelligence gave Ali lie detector tests for two days as a condition for him receiving computer software for hacking into the Atomic Energy Agency's computer systems, it added.
Ali's family denied the accusations Tuesday, saying he was the one to report to authorities that the people he worked with in Hong Kong were suspicious. The family did not know more specific details.
"We leave it to God to take revenge on his behalf. Is this what he gets for informing about them and trying to defend the security of his country? He did nothing wrong," Ali's wife said from her home in Giza, Cairo's twin city. She declined to give her name because of the sensitivity of the issue.
Ali graduated from Alexandria University in 1994 with a bachelor's degree in nuclear engineering and obtained a diploma in nuclear reactor physics from Cairo University in 1999, Badawi told the news conference.
He got a job at the Atomic Energy Agency in 1997 and went to the Israeli embassy in Cairo in May 1999 to ask for a grant to study nuclear engineering at Tel Aviv University.
The visit aroused the suspicions of Egyptian authorities, who told Ali not to go to the embassy without informing his superiors at work, the statement said.
The statement said Ali's contacts were interested in information about the capability of the Inshas reactor, how many hours it operated, the type of experiments conducted with it, any technical problems with the reactor and reasons for them.
They also wanted to know how frequently the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspects the reactor, it said.
Egypt has a small research atomic reactor. It has recently announced plans to develop a nuclear energy program more than 20 years after it abandoned the idea of building a reactor in the aftermath of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
Egyptian Minister of Electricity and Energy Hassan Yunis said this year that his country could have an operational nuclear power plant within 10 years. The plan is to build a 1,000-megawatt nuclear power plant at Al-Dabaa on the Mediterranean coast.
This is the second spy scandal that has been exposed in the past two years. Previously, Mohammed el-Attar, 30, a former student at the Islamic Al-Azhar university in Cairo, was arrested on January 1, 2007 as he returned from abroad to visit his family in Egypt.
According to prosecutors, el-Attar confessed to spying for Israel and gave a detailed account of his role in collecting information about Egyptians and Arabs living in Turkey and Canada in return for money.
He also received instructions from the three Israelis, said to be intelligence officers, to recruit Christian Egyptian immigrants in Canada using money and sex.
The alleged confession claimed el-Attar fled Egypt in 2001 and sought asylum with the UN refugee agency offices in Turkey after he was sentenced to three years in prison for bank fraud.
The confession also alleged that el-Attar converted to Christianity in Istanbul and was allegedly sent to Canada, where he delivered more reports about Christian Egyptians.