Jailan Halawi listens to engineer minutes before a state security court convicts him of espionage and sentences him to 25 years behind bars On Monday, entrances to the Downtown Cairo court house of Bab Al-Khalq were barricaded, and anyone wanting to enter the building had to run the gamut of security personnel. Policemen checked our identities before we made it to the corridors, and then again before admission to the courtroom itself. Dozens of reporters and photographers were already crammed into the room. They were there to record any and every move made by Mohamed Sayed Saber behind the bars of the dock. The trial of Saber, a nuclear engineer at Egypt's state-run Atomic Power Agency (EAPA), has been underway for the past two months in a state security court. He is charged with passing documents relating to Inshas, the site of one of Egypt's nuclear reactors, to foreign agents believed to be working for the Israeli Intelligence Agency Mossad, for which he allegedly received $17,000. Since his trial opened in April, Saber has spent much of his time in court smiling and waving at photographers. His responses have been variously interpreted as a failure to comprehend the gravity of his situation or else a manifestation of anxiety. Those attending the session as they waited for the three-judge panel to deliver its verdict expressed little sympathy for the man in the dock -- he had, after all, expressed his admiration for Israel on several occasions -- though his devastated parents, who throughout the trial maintained that their son was innocent, were treated more kindly. "I am innocent," Saber told Al-Ahram Weekly. "I was the one that reported to the Egyptian authorities that someone was trying to recruit me. [The trial] is the state's way of investigating what I reported and my innocence will be proven." Saber is reported to have said under questioning that he at one point considered emigrating to Israel, applying to the Israeli Embassy in Cairo. When asked why by the court, he said he believed that living in Israel was the only way he could progress with his research. "I don't need Israel to help me," Saber said on the day of his judgement. "I am already successful. Expressing my admiration for [Israeli] research methods is not treason." At 11am the three-judge panel entered the court to announce the sentence. Saber and his two alleged accomplices -- an Irishman identified as Brian Peter and a Japanese named Shiro Izo -- were found guilty and given life sentences. The two foreigners had been tried in absentia and their whereabouts remain unknown. Saber remained silent throughout the ruling. "This is an unfair sentence and we will contest it the moment the court issues its explanation of the ruling," said one of Saber's lawyers. In earlier court sessions Saber had admitted taking the documents from his work place but said they had already been published and were not classified. Saber is also reported to have provided his co-defendants with general information on the High Dam, uranium enrichment and Egypt's plans for a new nuclear reactor. The defendant told the court he had met the two foreign defendants several times in Hong Kong before he began to suspect they might be working for Israel. "I became convinced after the fourth meeting that I was dealing with parties working for a foreign intelligence apparatus," he said, adding that he then informed an Egyptian General Intelligence official in Saudi Arabia about his suspicions. The official, identified as Ahmed Bahaaeddin, subsequently told investigators he believed Saber contacted him only after he began to worry that his espionage for Israel would be revealed. Ali Islam, head of the EAPA, said Saber stole confidential reports from the agency and passed them to Mossad. It was an act, said Islam, that could harm Egypt's political and economic interests. Islam testified that Saber obtained the confidential and classified documents illegally and kept them for 10 years. He added that in 1999 Saber was transferred to another department after attempting to "meddle" in the running of a nuclear reactor. Saber was arrested on 18 February at the Cairo International Airport as he returned from Hong Kong. In the indictment released by the attorney-general in April, Saber and his co-defendants were accused of seeking to obtain information about Egypt's nuclear energy programme with the aim of passing such information to Israel. Saber is also accused of hacking into the computer database of the Ministry of Power and Electricity. Saber also told the court his contacts had at one point promised to give him a special communication device to plant in the EAPA and the Egyptian official he contacted in Saudi Arabia had advised him to collect the device and return with it to Egypt. According to security sources, Saber visited the Israeli Embassy in Cairo in 1999 seeking a scholarship in nuclear engineering at Tel Aviv University. Later he made several trips to Hong Kong where he met Israeli intelligence agents. He agreed to cooperate with them and subsequently received a laptop with a coded programme. Saber and his family insist that it was the defendant who first alerted the authorities when he informed them of his suspicions concerning the people he had met in Hong Kong. Egypt recently announced its intention to restart the nuclear energy programme it abandoned 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 El-Attar confessed to collaborating with Mossad, providing it with information about the Arab expatriate community in Turkey and Canada. He received $500 for each report. El-Attar maintains his innocence and says his confessions were extracted under duress. He was arrested on 1 January at the Cairo International Airport after returning from Canada.
