An Egyptian being tried for spying for Israel claimed on Monday he had information on the bombings of two airliners, including one which killed more than 250 people over the Scottish town of Lockerbie in 1988, a court source said.
Magdi Anwar Mohammed Tawfiq, a 52-year-old unemployed man, told the High State Security Court in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria he had contacted the local Israeli consul “to give his account of the Lockerbie affair and the crash of a French plane in the Niger desert” in 1989, the source said.
Tawfiq did not give the court details of what he told the Israeli consul about the attacks, both of which Libya was eventually implicated in.
A total of 270 people, 259 on board and 11 on the ground, were killed when Pan Am Flight 103 blew up over the southwest Scottish town of Lockerbie on December 21, 1988. Another 170 people were killed when an UTA DC-10 exploded over the Niger desert in September 1989.
Tawfiq pleaded innocent at the opening of his trial here on Saturday. He was referred last month to the court on charges of attempting to carry out “acts of espionage” on Israel’s behalf, according to the charge sheet.
He is accused of sending faxes to the Israeli consulate in Alexandria offering them “important information about Egypt’s political and diplomatic activities.”
Tawfiq introduced himself as a minister plenipotentiary at the Egyptian foreign ministry who “asked to cooperate with the Israeli intelligence service (Mossad) and to supply the Israelis with information undermining Egypt’s political, diplomatic and economic status,” the charge sheet said.
A plenipotentiary minister is a diplomat who has full power to act on behalf of the country he represents.
Tawfiq is also accused of “falsifying official documents.”
The sentences of the high state security court cannot be appealed.
Police had said he was arrested in Egypt around eight months earlier, making him the second Egyptian to be arrested on charges of spying for Israel since September 2000 when the latest Palestinian uprising began.
Sherif al-Filali, a 35-year-old engineer, was sentenced to 15 years of hard labour after Cairo’s high state security court convicted him of passing military secrets to Israel’s foreign intelligence service, the Mossad. ? AFP