Gonen Segev, a former Israeli cabinet minister, indicted on suspicion of spying for Iran, appeared publicly for the first time at a Jerusalem court on Thursday (July 5) since he was charged.
At the end of the closed-door session the judges ruled that Segev will be held in custody until the end of the trial.
Last month Israel's Shin Bet internal security service said that Segev, energy minister from 1995 to 1996, had been living in Nigeria and “was recruited by Iranian intelligence and served as an agent.”
Investigators found that Segev made contact with officials at the Iranian embassy in Nigeria in 2012 and that he visited Iran twice for meetings with his handlers, the Shin Bet said.
62-year-old Segev, it said, received an encrypted communications system from Iranian agents and supplied Iran with “information related to the energy sector, security sites in Israel and officials in political and security institutions”. It also said he put some Israelis involved in the security sector in contact with Iranian intelligence agents, introducing the Iranians as businessmen.
Segev's attorney said that that most details from the indictment remained a secret, as requested by the state, but that he believed and hoped that after the trial ends the “affair will return to its natural dimensions and right proportions.”
Segev, a physician, was jailed in Israel in 2004 after being convicted of attempting to smuggle Ecstasy pills into the country. He left Israel in 2007 after his release from prison. The Shin Bet said Segev was arrested during a visit to Equatorial Guinea in May and extradited to Israel, where he is being detained.
Israel has long been locked in a shadow war with arch-foe Iran, which supports Islamist guerrillas in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon and whose nuclear program is widely believed to have been targeted repeatedly by Israeli saboteurs.