Israeli spies back at the forefront

The family of Elias Younes, the man suspected of spying for Israel, is keeping a low profile and taking its lawyers’ advice not to dive into this case for the time being, especially after the shocking arrest of the family’s 71-year-old patriarch put them in a rather difficult psychological situation.       

The State commissioner to the military court Judge Saqr Saqr charged him with dealing with Israel, and transferred him to the First Military Investigative Magistrate Riad Abu Ghayda.       

The preliminary investigation showed that Younes began dealing with the Israelis in 1977 when he was an employee at the Ministry of Telecommunications. Since then and until the Israeli invasion in 1982, he provided them with plans for the telephone exchange and the junctions.         

Investigations showed that Elias Younes stopped dealing with the enemy between 1982 and 1999, but resumed contact thereafter until 2008 despite the fact that he retired from the ministry in 2005. During this period, he provided them with additional information on the fixed-line network, mobile networks and the junctions between the two networks.            

Investigations showed that Elias Younes was meeting with his Israeli employers outside of Lebanon in European countries. He travelled more than 30 times and earned large sums of money in US currency in exchange for his information.          

Surprisingly, Elias Younes says he had halted all contacts with the Israelis since 2008 and was arrested by the Army Intelligence according to contacts he had made since this date and before it, mainly through his mobile phone where numbers suspected to belong to Mossad agents in Europe were found.