Cairo court jails Egyptian for spying for Iran

A Cairo court sentenced an Egyptian man to 35 years in prison yesterday for spying for Iran's armed forces and planning to assassinate Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

Iran dismissed the trial as a sham. "From the beginning, this scenario was baseless and lacked legal proofs. (The trial) is meant for servile flattery to the Zionist regime (Israel)," Foreign Ministry Spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said in Tehran.

Iran has not had full diplomatic ties with Egypt since the Iranian revolution in 1979, when Tehran broke off relations because Egypt had signed a peace treaty with Israel.

The court sentenced Mahmoud Eid Mohamed Dabbous to 25 years for plotting to kill Mr Mubarak and 10 years for giving Iran's Revolutionary Guards information about a petrochemicals plant in the Saudi oil city of Yanbu with the aim of blowing it up.

Iran's Revolutionary Guards are an ideologically driven branch of the country's armed forces.

Egypt's public prosecutor had previously said Dabbous, who was working in Saudi Arabia at the time, had supplied Iranian diplomat Mohammad Reza Hosseindost with information that helped orchestrate an attack on Yanbu in May last year.

A wing of the militant group al Qaeda claimed the attack, which killed five Western engineers.

The court also sentenced in absentia Hosseindost to 25 years in prison for recruiting Dabbous and plotting terror attacks and political assassinations in Egypt. Hosseindost worked in the Iranian interests office in Cairo.

The Iranian spokesman, quoted by the state news agency IRNA, said: "The Islamic Republic from the beginning rejected the claims of the Egyptian prosecutor and will demand explanations from the Egyptian government."

Dabbous said during his trial that he made confessions under pressure about planning to kill the president.