My son 'would not betray Egypt'

Cairo: Though her son was arrested two months ago, she was shocked at learning on Tuesday that he was charged with spying for Israel.

"I can't believe that my son, whom I know well, is a spy for Israel," the distraught mother told Gulf News from behind the door of an apartment in an elegant building in Al Ahram area, south of Cairo.

The Egyptian authorities said this week that Mohammad Sayed Saber, a nuclear engineer, had been detained on charges of spying for Israel.

Saber, 35, had been arrested upon his arrival at Cairo airport last February from Hong Kong where he had allegedly met foreign agents for the Israeli secret service Mossad.

Two fugitive foreigners - an Irishman and a Japanese national - are involved in the case.

Egypt's Prosecutor-General Hesham Badawi said in a statement that Saber had handed over documents to Israeli agents from his workplace at the state's Atomic Energy Agency in return for $17,000 (Dh62,390).

"My son is innocent. He would not betray his country. He would not do anything bad for money," added the mother.

"He has been on an unpaid leave from his workplace in Egypt since 2004. So how could he obtain secret information and pass it on to Israel? I put my trust in God," she added before bursting into tears.

Teaching in Saudi Arabia

The Egyptian authorities said that in 1999 Saber approached the Israeli embassy in Cairo for a grant to study nuclear engineering in Tel Aviv before getting a job as a teacher in Saudi Arabia where he came into contact with the Israeli agents through the Net.

Egypt was the first Arab country to sign a peace treaty with Israel in 1979.

"Upon his return from a scientific conference in Hong Kong, my husband told me on the phone from Saudi Arabia that he had gone to the Egyptian embassy in Riyadh and told them he had met officials at a notorious company there who asked him to provide them with secret information about Egypt, but he refused," said his wife Manal, who also insisted on talking from behind the door.

She added that Saber had changed his academic field to computer science after his research in nuclear engineering had been turned down.

"On February 18, 2007, I was surprised to see him coming from the Cairo airport escorted by strange men. He said they were from the Egyptian intelligence service.

"They searched our apartment and left with him after seizing his academic documents and a laptop. Since that day, neither his two little children nor I have seen him."

The news of Saber's arrest came months after Egypt's detention of Mohammad Al Attar, an Egyptian-born Canadian citizen, on charges of spying for Israel. Al Attar will stand trial in Cairo on Saturday.