Engineer Mohamed Saber admits to contacts with Mossad agents but denies he was spying for Israel. Jailan Halawi attends the opening of Egypt's latest espionage trial The trial of engineer Mohamed Sayed Saber on charges of spying for Israel opened at Bab Al-Khalq State Security Court on Tuesday amid heavy security and huge media interest. Speaking from the dock, the defendant admitted to collaborating with the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad but insisted that the information he passed was not classified. That, he said, is why he was pleading innocent. Wearing a white t-shirt and trousers, Saber smiled nervously as he told journalists he was sure the court would judge him innocent. Saber is reported to have said during questioning that he had at one point considered emigrating to Israel, going so far as to apply to the Israeli Embassy in Cairo. When asked by the presiding judge why he had contemplated such a step, Saber said he admired the work of Israel's universities and believed that living there would be the best way to progress with his own research. According to alleged confessions leaked to the press ahead of the trial, Saber told his interrogators he had faced problems at work, believing those in charge had held back his career. He went on to tell the court that while he supported peace with the people of Israel this did not mean he had spied for the Jewish state. Saber is reported to have provided his Irish and Japanese co-defendants -- they are being tried in absentia -- with general information on the High Dam, uranium enrichment and Egypt's planned nuclear reactor. None of the information, he said, was classified. Saber was arrested on 18 February at the Cairo International Airport as he was returning from Hong Kong. In the indictment released by the attorney-general in April, Saber and his co- defendants are accused of seeking to obtain data on Egypt's nuclear energy programme with the objective of passing such information to Israel. Saber, who worked for the Egyptian Atomic Power Agency (EAPA), is also accused of hacking into the computer database of the Ministry of Power and Electricity. The indictment further accuses Saber of delivering "important and secret information" about both the EAPA and two nuclear reactors in Egypt to "Israeli intelligence agents" in exchange for $20,000. According to security sources in 1999, Saber visited the Israeli Embassy in Cairo seeking a scholarship in nuclear engineering at Tel Aviv University. Later, he made several trips to Hong Kong, where he is alleged to have met with Israeli intelligence agents. He agreed to cooperate with them and subsequently received a laptop with a coded programme for spying. Saber's family deny the accusations. It was Saber, they say, who first alerted the authorities when he informed them of his suspicions over the people he had met in Hong Kong. Saber joined the Egyptian Atomic Agency 10 years ago. In 2004, he went to work in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, taking time off from his job with the agency. He has travelled to Hong Kong four times in the last 12 months. Israeli Foreign Ministry Spokesman Mark Regev said the charges had come as no surprise. "We've heard about this from the media. These sorts of charges appear frequently in the Egyptian media and always prove baseless." Egypt recently announced its intention to restart the nuclear energy programme halted more than two decades ago in the aftermath of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. In statements made earlier this year, Minister of Electricity and Energy Hassan Younis said that Egypt could have an operational nuclear power plant within 10 years. The current plan is to build a 1,000 megawatt nuclear power plant at Al-Dabaa on the Mediterranean coast. Saber's is the second espionage case this year. In April a state security court sentenced Egyptian- Canadian Mohamed Essam El-Attar to 15 years in prison. Three Israeli accomplices, tried in absentia, were also found guilty. Thirty-one-year-old Attar confessed to collaborating with Mossad, providing them with information about the Arab expatriate community in Turkey and Canada. He received $500 for each report. Attar maintains his innocence and says his confessions were extracted under duress. He was arrested on 1 January at the Cairo International Airport. Several espionage cases have hit the headlines in recent years. In 2002 engineer Sherif Al-Filali was found guilty of spying on behalf of Israel and sentenced to 15 years in prison with hard labour. In 1996, an Egyptian state security court sentenced Azzam Azzam, an Arab Israeli, to 15 years in prison after being found guilty of spying. He was exchanged eight years later for six Egyptian students held in Israel. The court adjourned Saber's trial until 9 June.
