Israeli on trial in absentia in new Egyptian spy case, Cairo daily claims

An Israeli and a Jordanian are being tried in Egypt on counts of espionage, accused of enabling Israel to eavesdrop on Egyptian officials’ mobile telephone conversations, the Egyptian establishment daily Al-Ahram reported on Friday.

Jordanian Bashar Ibrahim Abu-Zeid, an engineer at the Egyptian telecommunications company Mobinil, is accused of sending 300 SIM cards to an Israeli intelligence agent, Ophir Harari, hidden inside a child’s toy. The toy was caught by Egyptian authorities last March on its way to Israel, the daily reports. Harari is being tried in absentia by a Cairo criminal court.

Abu-Zeid’s name emerged during a related espionage trial, where four Egyptian employees of Mobinil are accused of erecting a 70-meter-high communications tower in Ojah, near the Egyptian-Israeli border, enabling the transfer of internet-based telephone communications (VOIP) to an Israeli intelligence base.

Al-Ahram reports that a secure military base was detected on the Israeli side of the border using satellite imaging, and the illegal antenna on the Egyptian side was directed towards the Israeli base. In a detailed report prepared for the trial, Egyptian investigators found that approximately one million minutes of international telephone conversations were transmitted to Israel through the suspicious antenna near the border, attributed mostly to Egyptian officials.

Curiously, the story — which made Al-Ahram’s front page on Friday — was not reported in the daily’s English online edition.

Egypt has been obsessively tracking Israeli alleged espionage attempts since the outbreak of the revolution last February. In March 2011 Egyptian authorities uncovered an “Israeli spy ring,” and in June 2011 Israeli-American student Ilan Grapel was arrested for four months on charges of spying for Israel.