Jerusalem | A former Israeli government minister charged with spying for archenemy Iran will serve 11 years in prison as part of a plea bargain with authorities, Israel’s justice ministry said on Wednesday (Thursday AEDT).
The ministry said Gonen Segev agreed to the deal after confessing to severe espionage and passing information to an enemy. The plea bargain will be brought to a judge next month and no further information was provided.
The announcement capped another stunning turn of events for Segev, who served as energy minister under Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in the mid-1990s. He was later arrested in 2004 for trying to smuggle 32,000 Ecstasy tablets from the Netherlands using an expired diplomatic passport, and served prison time for that.
A former doctor whose medical license was revoked, Segev was released from prison in Israel in 2007 and had been living in Africa in recent years
Segev was extradited from Equatorial Guinea and arrested upon arrival in Israel last May on suspicion of acting as an agent for Iranian intelligence and relayed information about the “energy market and security sites in Israel.”
Israel’s Shin Bet security service initially said Segev met with his operators twice in Iran, and also met with Iranian agents in hotels and apartments around the world. A gag order was placed on most of the details.
Read the article by Aron Heller in The Australian Financial Review.