CAIRO: Five officers from Israel’s Mossad spy agency and three Egyptians will stand trial on charges of spying for the Jewish state, judicial sources said. Egyptian prosecutors have accused the eight of espionage and supplying Israel with information impacting Egypt’s national security, the sources said yesterday.
The trial is expected to open with none of the defendants present, the sources said, because the Mossad officers are “on the run” while it is not clear if the three Egyptians had been arrested. The Egyptian suspects hail from Rafah, on the border with the Palestinian Gaza Strip, they said, adding that the trial will be held in the Suez canal city of Ismailiya. The trial of a Jordanian engineer accused of having spied for Israel is also underway in Egypt.
In October 2011, Israel freed 25 Egyptians in exchange for the release of a US-Israeli called Ilan Grapel, who had been held in Cairo for four months on spying charges. Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, the first Arab country to have done that.
Saudi beheads citizen for murder
RIYADH: Saudi authorities beheaded a citizen in the northeastern city of Arar yesterday after he was convicted of murder, the interior ministry said.
Habib Al Shammari was accused of killing fellow tribesman Mishaal Al Shammari following a dispute, the ministry said in a statement published by the official SPA news agency.
The execution was the fourth carried out this year in Saudi Arabia, which beheaded 78 people in 2013, according to a count.
Wanted Shia surrenders
RIYADH: A Saudi man wanted in connection with protests in 2011 among the Shia minority in the kingdom has handed himself in, police said yesterday.
Musa Jaafar Mohammed Al Mabyuq surrendered to police in the mostly Shiite district of Qatif, in Eastern Province, a police spokesman said in a statement carried by the official SPA news agency.
Mabyuq “will be dealt with according to legal procedures,” the unnamed spokesman said, praising “the constructive role of his family” in the surrender, without giving further details or saying when he had given himself up to the authorities. The unrest in Eastern Province started after an outbreak of violence between Shia pilgrims and religious police in the holy city of Madinah, in western Saudi Arabia, in February 2011.
Agencies
