Ex-Israeli minister to get 11 years in prison over spying for Iran

Under a plea bargain with prosecutors, ex-Israeli energy minister Gonen Segev accused of spying for Iran has agreed to plead guilty to reduced charges against him and serve a prison term of over a decade.

Israel’s Justice Ministry announced on Wednesday that under the negotiated bargain, Segev would plead guilty to charges of serious espionage and transfer of information to the enemy.

In exchange, the ministry added, prosecutors would drop charges of aiding the enemy and sentence the former minister to 11 years in prison.

The Jerusalem al-Quds District Attorney’s Office said that a sentencing hearing for Segev would take place on February 11.

Segev was elected to the 13th Israeli parliament (Knesset) in 1992. He also served as the regime’s energy and infrastructure minister from 1995 to 1996.

Last June, Israel’s so-called Security Agency, better known by the acronym Shabak or the Shin Bet, said that Segev had been arrested a month earlier on suspicion of committing the offenses of assisting the enemy in a time of war and of spying against Tel Aviv.

PressTV-Ex-Israeli minister charged with ‘spying for Iran’

A former Israeli energy minister is charged with “passing information” to Iran and engaging in acts of “espionage” against the Tel Aviv regime.

“The defendant gave the Iranians secret information with the intention of harming state security. Among other things, the information included the location of security installations, the names of security personnel, and more. The accused also gave the Iranians dozens of pieces of information in order to harm state security," read the charge sheet.

An investigation by the Shin Bet and the police found that Segev had acted as an agent on behalf of the Iranian intelligence, made contact with officials in the Iranian Embassy in Nigeria in 2012 and visited Iran twice to meet intelligence officials.

It also found that Segev had met with his Iranian operators around the world and received a secret communications system to encrypt the messages between himself and his operators.

During his interrogation in June 2018, Segev admitted to having established links with Iranian officials, but claimed that he had had no ideological or financial reason to spy for Iran.

“I wanted to fool the Iranians and come back to Israel a hero,” he was quoted as saying during his interrogation.

Israeli media and observers interpreted the developments as a victory for the Iranian intelligence services.

Ha’aretz wrote back then, “For Iranian intelligence, the recruitment of a former cabinet minister and Knesset member like Gonen Segev as an agent would have been a significant achievement.”

Tehran has not officially confirmed the espionage reports. However, the Iranian Intelligence Ministry made an apparent reference to reports of Segev’s espionage for Tehran late last month, while responding to claims by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about spying operations inside Iran.

The director general for counter-espionage at the Iranian Intelligence Ministry said the premier’s “delusional” comments were meant to ease “the most intense internal and foreign pressure” on him “due to leaks about an Israeli minister spying for Iran as well as the large-scale infiltration of the Zionist regime’s intelligence services by those of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

The Iranian official revealed that Netanyahu had recently ordered Shin Bet to check on all political, parliamentary and intelligence officials for possible contacts with Iranian intelligence services.

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