Former Israeli cabinet minister Gonen Segev is to be jailed for 11 years after he admitted spying for Iran, BBC News reports, citing Israel’s justice ministry.
Segev, who served as energy minister in the 1990s, was allegedly recruited while working as a doctor in Nigeria.
He was accused of leaking details about Israeli officials and security sites.
Segev was detained in Equatorial Guinea in May and extradited to
Israel. He pleaded guilty to serious espionage as part of a deal with
prosecutors.
The 63-year-old will be formally sentenced at a hearing on 11 February.
There was no immediate comment from the Iranian authorities.
Ever since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, when religious
hardliners came to power, Iran’s leaders have called for Israel’s
elimination. Iran rejects Israel’s right to exist, considering it an
illegitimate occupier of Muslim land.
In 2005, Segev was given a five-year prison sentence after being
convicted of trying to smuggle 30,000 ecstasy pills from the Netherlands
to Israel using a diplomatic passport with a falsified expiry date.
He also had his licence to practice medicine revoked, but he was
allowed to work as a doctor in Nigeria when he moved there after his
release from jail in 2007.
Israel’s internal security service, Shin Bet, said in June that
Segev had confessed to making contact with Iranian embassy officials in
Nigeria in 2012 and visiting Iran twice to meet his handlers.
He was allegedly given a classified communications system to send
coded messages and passed on “information related to the energy sector,
security sites in Israel and officials in political and security
institutions”.