By Xinhua
Cairo : Egypt's state security court sentenced Mohamed Sayyed Saber, a nuclear engineer at Egypt's state-run Atomic Energy Agency, and two others to 25 years in jail for spying for Israel, the Egyptian official MENA news agency reported Monday.
Ali Islam, the head of the Egyptian atomic agency, testified that Saber illegally obtained classified documents from his department and kept them for 10 years in defiance of regulations that prevented him from keeping them in his possession, MENA added.
Saber was accused of stealing confidential reports from the agency and handing them over to Israel's Mossad (Israeli intelligence agency) for US$17,000. Prosecutors asked the court to give him the maximum penalty possible for hacking into the agency's computer system, stealing the classified documents and selling them to Israel.
Saber, 35, who was arrested at the beginning of the year, had pleaded not guilty to the espionage charges and looked shocked when the verdict was read out.
During the trial, he insisted that any information he had divulged was already in the public domain.
The two others, a Japanese and an Irish national, were tried in absentia and received the same sentence of 25 years in jail.