The Israeli nuclear whistleblower, Mordechai Vanunu, is facing another term in prison after he was charged on Thursday with breaching a gag order imposed on his release from an 18-year sentence last April.
Israeli prosecutors laid 22 charges against Vanunu at a Jerusalem magistrate’s court for allegedly exposing nuclear secrets in interviews with the foreign press and for attempting to visit Bethlehem at Christmas. If convicted, he faces up to two years in jail.
After he was freed last year at the end of his sentence for revealing the inner workings of Israel’s nuclear weapons programme to The Sunday Times, Vanunu was served with a court order forbidding him to contact or pass information to foreigners or to leave Israel.
Vanunu told The Guardian on Thursday that he did not know if the charges were a serious attempt to put him back in prison or simply to silence him amid an international campaign to have the restrictions lifted when they come up for renewal in July.
”They have to decide what they want to do with me. The police spent a lot of time watching me to see what I was doing and now they charged me for giving interviews to the foreign media. It is a breach of the conditions of my release. I don’t think it is a big offence but maybe they do.”
Shortly after he took up residence at an East Jerusalem cathedral on his release, Vanunu began giving interviews to The Guardian, the BBC and dozens of other media organisations in defiance of the gag order.
The indictment was filed after the police arrested Vanunu for the third time in less than a year but he was not held in custody.
The prosecution told the court on Thursday that Vanunu systematically and knowingly had violated the restrictions with interviews in which he described Israel’s Dimona nuclear plant, where he worked as a technician, and its production capabilities. The indictment said he had also named atomic materials used at the reactor.
”Since his release Vanunu has maintained contact with numerous foreign journalists and even told some of them he was aware he was violating the terms of his release by meeting and exchanging information with them,” Israel’s justice ministry said.
Vanunu, a convert to Christianity, also faces charges of attempting to leave the country, most notably last Christmas Eve when he was stopped by the army on his way to attend midnight mass in Bethlehem.
The charges came a day after an Israeli parliamentary committee cancelled a debate about whether the restrictions on Vanunu should be lifted.
”I have no more secrets to tell and have not set foot in Dimona for more than 18 years,” Vanunu said on Wednesday. ”I have been out of prison, although not free, for one year. Despite the illegal restrictions on my speech, I have again and again spoken out against the use of nuclear weapons anywhere and by any nation. I have given away no sensitive secrets because I have none.”
However, in July 2004, the Israeli high court rejected a petition for the gag order to be removed after the judges determined that he still possessed sensitive security information even two decades after working at Dimona.
Supporters of Vanunu in Jerusalem for the parliamentary debate included Daniel Ellsberg, who in 1971 leaked the Pentagon Papers on the Vietnam war. ”That, after 18 years of imprisonment and solitary confinement and mistreatment, a person can still come out sane, articulate, compassionate — this is the secret that no regime wants its citizens to know,” he said.
A mob of Jewish religious students attacked and severely beat Palestinian labourers working on a West Bank settlement yesterday, sending at least five to hospital. The police said about 40 yeshiva students, some with clubs, ”almost lynched” the eight Palestinians on Nahliel settlement. One is in a critical condition. – Guardian Unlimited Â