CAIRO: An Egyptian with Canadian citizenship on trial for spying for Israel shouted from his courtroom cage on Wednesday that his earlier confession had been extracted under torture. I call on the Canadian government to give me a lawyer and to prove my innocence – my confession was under torture, Mohammed Essam Ghoneim Al-Attar, 31, told reporters clustered around his cage before proceedings began. Al-Attar was arrested in Cairo on January 1 during a visit with his family, on charges of bribery, espionage and conspiring to harm Egypt s national interests.
Three Israelis are being tried in the same case but in absentia. A former student at Cairo s Al-Azhar University, Al-Attar is accused of spying for Israel s Mossad and has been described in the press as a homosexual and a convert to Christianity. He has denied both allegations. Al-Attar said he had been treated well by police but that Egypt s intelligence service tortured him into a making up a story of espionage, which he borrowed from an Egyptian comic book. I am accusing one man from national security, Nabil Mahmud. He made me sign a document saying that I d cooperated with a fictional character called Daniel Levy, he said. One of three Israelis has that name and Egypt has asked Interpol to arrest him and the two other Israelis, said to be of Turkish origin. Al-Attar s court-assigned lawyer resigned before the first hearing last Saturday. According to the charges against him, Al-Attar contacted the Israelis in Turkey where he started spying for them on other expatriate Arabs, a practice he continued after emigrating to Canada. According to a Canadian newspaper, Al-Attar told Egyptian interrogators he recruited several gay or financially strapped Arabs for Mossad while he was living in Canada. A transcript of his interrogation in Egypt, viewed by The Globe and Mail newspaper, alleged he was a gay Zionist who turned his back on Islam and worked with the Israeli spy agency to undermine Egypt s security. He cited his new religion and homosexuality in applying for UN refugee status, which eventually landed him in Canada.
