EGYPT:A man identified by Egyptian authorities as an Irish national has been sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia for his part in a suspected espionage plot in which an Egyptian nuclear engineer allegedly passed on information to Israel.
Mystery surrounds the identity and whereabouts of the man Egypt claims is an Irish citizen named Brian Peter. No further information about the man has emerged since he was charged in absentia in April. His whereabouts remain unknown.
In a statement, the Department of Foreign Affairs said it had found no record of the named man holding an Irish passport.
"This follows a trawl of documentation initiated by the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Dermot Ahern. The Embassy in Cairo and the department will continue, however, to monitor the situation," the statement added.
One diplomatic source told The Irish Times: "This may or may not be his real name. The allegation is the only thing we have to go by."
Two other men were sentenced to life imprisonment when the trial concluded in Cairo yesterday. They were Mohamed Sayed Saber Ali, an engineer at Egypt's state-run Atomic Energy Agency, and a Japanese man named as Shiro Izo, also sentenced in absentia.
Ali was arrested in Egypt in February after returning from Hong Kong, where he claimed to have met Peter and Izo on a number of occasions. Egyptian authorities claim the two foreigners were working for Israeli intelligence.
It is alleged the two men told Ali they wanted him to work for them from inside Egypt's nuclear agency and obtain documents about the country's nuclear programme.
Egypt claims the two men wanted information about the capability of its Inshas reactor and the type of experiments conducted with it.
The small Inshas reactor, located just north of Cairo, was established for research purposes alone but Egypt last year announced plans for a civilian nuclear programme.
Israel has rejected Egypt's claims that it recruited Ali to spy on his country's nuclear activities.
The Egyptian was convicted of taking secret documents from Inshas and handing them over to his two alleged contacts in return for $17,000.
He told the court that he had met the two foreigners a number of times in Hong Kong before growing suspicious that they may be intelligence agents.
Ali told the court that on his final trip to Hong Kong in February, the two contacts had promised to provide him with software to hack into the agency's computer system but backed out of their plan after he failed a lie detector test.
Ali admitted taking documents from his workplace but insisted they were not classified and were already in the public domain. He said he had kept officials at the Egyptian embassy in Saudi Arabia, where he lived, informed of his dealings with the two men and denied that it had amounted to espionage.
The case was not the first time Egypt has accused Israel of spying on its nuclear activities. Earlier this year a Cairo court sentenced a man with dual Egyptian-Canadian citizenship to 15 years in jail after he was convicted of being an agent working for Israeli intelligence.
Mohammed al-Attar (31) confessed to the charge but later said the admission had been extracted under torture by Egypt's intelligence services.
Egyptian trials of suspected Israeli spies have strained relations between Israel and Egypt, which, in 1979, became the first Arab country to make peace with the Jewish state.