A nuclear engineer at Egypt's state-run Atomic Energy Agency pleaded innocent on Tuesday to charges of spying for Israel at the opening of a case in which an Irish and a Japanese national are being tried in absentia.
Mohamed Sayed Saber Ali is on trial over accusations he took documents from his workplace at Inshas, site of one of Egypt's small nuclear reactors, and gave them to foreign contacts said to be working for Israeli intelligence for $17,000. An Israeli foreign ministry spokesman said he had no information on the matter. The trial was adjourned until June 9.
Egyptian trials of suspected spies for Israel have often soured relations between Israel and Egypt, which in 1979 became the first Arab country to make peace with the Jewish state. Last month, an Egyptian-Canadian dual citizen was sentenced to 15 years in prison for spying for Israel in a separate case.
Egyptian security officials arrested Ali, 35, in February when he arrived in Cairo from one of several trips to Hong Kong, where prosecutors say he had meetings with his contacts. Prosecutors say the contacts told Ali during a meeting in Hong Kong that they wanted him to work for their company from inside Egypt's nuclear agency.
Later in December 2006, Ali is accused of handing over documents containing secret information about the agency and nuclear reactor at Inshas. In court, Ali denied he had handed over any secret information.
Ali told the Egyptian court that he had met several times in Hong Kong with two foreigners - identified by Egyptian media as Brian Peter of Ireland and Shiro Izo of Japan - but that he had informed Egyptian authorities of the meetings after growing suspicious of the two men.
"I became sure in the fourth meeting that I was dealing with a strange party that was working for a foreign intelligence apparatus," he told the court. He said he had informed an Egyptian intelligence official in Saudi Arabia about his contacts.
Ali told the court his contacts had at one point promised to give him a special communication device to plant in the Egyptian nuclear agency, and that the Egyptian official in Saudi Arabia had told him to get the device and return with it to Egypt.
But Ali said his contacts backed out of their promise after he failed a lie detector test. He said he had since become nearly certain that the men worked for Israel's Mossad. Egypt says 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 and the reasons for them. They also wanted to know how frequently the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspects the reactor.
Egypt's reactors are under IAEA supervision and the UN agency has had no serious complaints about Egyptian compliance with the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Ali, who has a bachelor's degree in nuclear engineering, got a job at the state Atomic Energy Agency in 1997. He aroused the suspicions of Egyptian authorities when he went to the Israeli embassy in Cairo in 1999 to ask for a grant to study nuclear engineering at Tel Aviv University.
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