Former Energy Minister Gonen Segev, once imprisoned for trying to smuggle illicit drugs into Israel, is back behind bars after being charged with spying for archenemy Iran, the Shin Bet security agency said Monday.
The Shin Bet said Segev, 62, was extradited from Equatorial Guinea in May and arrested upon arrival in Israel last month on suspicion of "committing offenses of assisting the enemy in war and spying against the State of Israel."
The agency said Segev had contacted officials at the Iranian Embassy in Nigeria in 2012 and visited Iran twice for meetings with his handlers.
He acted as an agent for Iranian intelligence and relayed information "connected to the energy market and security sites in Israel including buildings and officials in political and security organizations," the Shin Bet said.
Segev's defense team, attorneys Eli Zohar and Moshe Mazur, issued a statement that neither accepted nor denied the charges, saying only that the indictment paints a different picture than the Shin Bet alleges.
"The details of the indictment are largely confidential at the request of the state," the statement said.
"At this preliminary stage, all we can say is that the details that were permitted for publication make the [charges] appear more serious than they are."
The attorneys said they had been advising Segev since he returned to Israel a month ago.
Segev, who was a minister under Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in the mid-1990s, was arrested in 2004 for attempting to smuggle 32,000 Ecstasy tablets from the Netherlands to Israel using an expired diplomatic passport, which he doctored to appear valid.
In the wake of the affair, Segev, a trained pediatrician, had his license to practice medicine revoked.
Segev was released from prison in 2007 and has been living in Africa in recent years.
The Shin Bet said Segev met with his handlers twice in Iran, and also met with Iranian agents in hotels and apartments around the world. Segev was given a "secret communications system to encrypt messages" with his operators.
The statement said Segev maintained relationships with Israeli civilians who had ties to Israel's security and foreign relations. It said he acted to connect them with Iranian agents who posed as businessmen.
Israel Hayom has learned that Segev has been cooperating with the investigation. He confessed to engaging with the Iranians, but claimed he had no monetary or ideological motive, and that he was never in possession of any classified information to give the Iranians.
Initially, he also said he was trying to help Israel rather than harm its security, but a number of individuals in his camp refuted the claim.
Israel and Iran are bitter enemies, and the allegations against Segev are extremely grave. Israel considers Iran to be its biggest threat, citing Iranian calls for Israel's destruction, Iran's support for hostile terrorist groups such as Hezbollah, and its work on long-range missiles capable of reaching Israel.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been an outspoken critic of the 2015 international nuclear deal with Iran and welcomed the U.S. decision to withdraw from it earlier this year.
More recently, Israeli forces have carried out a number of airstrikes on Iranian forces in neighboring Syria.
An indictment was filed against Segev last week. A gag order was imposed on the case and no further details were available.
