The State Security Emergency Court on Saturday convicted an Egyptian-Canadian man of spying for Israel and sentenced him to 15 years in prison.

Three Israelis charged alongside Mohammed el-Attar and tried in absentia also received 15 years in prison.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said that Israel categorically denies any involvement in the case.

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The court said in its ruling: "He let himself be seduced by Satan, disregarding his country's values and selling himself and his country to the devil."

El-Attar, 30, and the Israeli defendants had been on trial since Feb. 24 at the Cairo court.

El-Attar, who had pleaded not guilty, flashed a victory sign when he entered the courtroom surrounded by dozens of security personnel and was rushed to a waiting police van after the verdict was issued.

Prosecutors said earlier 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 allegedly received instructions from the three Israelis, said to be intelligence officers, to recruit Christian Egyptian immigrants in Canada using money and sex.

El-Attar's defense lawyer Ibrahim el-Basyuni has said his confession was made under duress while being interrogated. The defendant told the court in an earlier session he confessed because he was tortured with electric shocks. However, Prosecutor Hani Hamoodah has insisted the defendant made the confession freely and without coercion.

El-Attar, a former student at the Islamic Al-Azhar university in Cairo, was arrested on Jan. 1 as he returned from abroad to visit his family in Egypt.

His alleged confession claimed he 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 issuing a bad check. It also alleged el-Attar converted to Christianity in Istanbul and was then sent to Canada, where he delivered more spy reports about Christian Egyptians.

El-Basyuni has denied el-Attar converted or that he received any money from Israel, saying his client supported himself by working in a bank in Canada.

There can be no appeal against the verdict of the emergency security court. Only President Hosni Mubarak can overturn the conviction.

In a separate ongoing spy case, Egyptian nuclear engineer Mohamed Sayed Saber Ali, 35, is facing trial over accusations of giving sensitive state nuclear information to Israel.

Prosecutors say Ali, who worked for the state Atomic Energy Agency, took documents from his work at a small nuclear research reactor and handed them to foreign contacts for $17,000.

Ali was arrested last month at the Cairo airport on his return from one of several trips to Hong Kong, where authorities say he met his contacts. An Irishman and a Japanese citizen are also charged in absentia in the case.

Prosecutors say Ali's contacts were interested in the Inshas reactor where he worked; how many hours it operated, the type of experiments conducted and any technical problems.

They also wanted to know how often the International Atomic Energy Agency inspects the reactor. Egypt dropped plans for nuclear power stations in the 1980s but the government last year said it would take another look at nuclear power as an alternative to fossil fuels.


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