Defense Ministry investigators raided the home yesterday of a former employee of the Israel Institute for Biological Research in Nes Tziona who is suspected of revealing state secrets.
The investigators, from the Defense Ministry's security arm, accompanied by a police officer, confiscated a computer hard drive and other material belonging to Dr. Yehoshua Gozes during the search of his Ramat Hasharon home. He was taken the Defense Ministry's Kirya compound in Tel Aviv for questioning.
Gozes refused to answer questions, and through the intervention of his attorney, Devorah Chen, he was released.
The raid was carried out with the approval of the state prosecutor's office.
The investigation began in June 2008 following an article in Haaretz about anthrax vaccine experiments conducted on Israel Defense Force soldiers in the early 1990s, led by Dr. Avigdor Shafferman, the director of the institute and an anthrax specialist. The article, which revealed problems and mishaps in the process of working on the vaccine, was released for publication only after a prolonged legal battle.
Since the investigation of a suspected leak at the institute, a number of employees have been questioned about their ties to Gozes. Gozes, a past chairman of the researchers' work committee, left the institute following recurring friction with Shafferman.
Since then he has reportedly been seen by Shafferman and the Defense Ministry's security arm as a "troublemaker," because of complaints he filed with the State Ombudsman and other officials about Shafferman's work.
The raid and the confiscation of documents are "scare tactics," Gozes told Haaretz yesterday.
"I have no doubt that this is revenge for my past activities as a representative of workers and my criticism of Dr. Shafferman's conduct," he said.
A committee of the Israel Medical Association recently released a report that was highly critical of the anthrax vaccine's development by the institute, citing what it called the IDF Medical Corps' scientifically unjustified trials, which contravened the Helsinki guidelines for human experimentation. The report hinted that Shafferman had "extraneous motives" in deciding to experiment on IDF soldiers at a time the state already had stockpiles of millions of doses of the vaccine.
The Defense Ministry spokesman declined to comment.
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