Benjamin Netanyahu has welcomed the termination by the US of strict parole conditions on convicted spy Jonathan Pollard, an American jailed in the US in 1985 for spying for Israel.
“The Prime Minister welcomes the lifting of restrictions from Jonathan Pollard” and hopes that he will “arrive in Israel soon,” Mr Netanyahu’s office said on Sunday.
Pollard, 66, served 30 years in prison for giving away classified US documents, and had been confined by parole terms to the US since his release in 2015, despite Israeli pressure to allow him to leave. The US Justice Department said on Saturday AEDT it had removed those conditions. Since leaving prison, he was kept in the US by the parole rules and not allowed to travel to Israel where his wife, whom he married after he was jailed, then lived.
He was a US Navy intelligence analyst in the 1980s when he made contact with an Israeli colonel in New York and began sending US secrets to Israel in exchange for tens of thousands of dollars.
The statement by Mr Netanyahu’s office said he had been committed to Pollard’s release “for many years” and had worked “tirelessly” to bring him to Israel.
Pollard, who is Jewish, passed thousands of crucial US documents to Israel, straining relations between the two close allies.
Read the article in The Australian (AFP).