Daily Star - Prosecutor Indicts 3 Men With Spying For Israel

By The Daily Star

BEIRUT: Lebanon’s military prosecutor indicted three Lebanese with spying for Israel Wednesday as part of an espionage investigation lasting nearly a year, in which at least 27 suspects have been detained.
If convicted, two of them could be given the death penalty and one could be sentenced to 20 years of hard labor. In the indictment, Judge Samih al-Hajj said the suspects had given Israel details on civil and military locations and on political figures.
The suspects were Hussein Ali Musa, Ahmad Hassan Abdullah known as Ahmad Tannous and Jaafar Hussein Halawi. Tannous was indicted in absentia because he had fled to Israel.
According to the indictment, Musa joined the South Lebanon Army in the 1980s and went on to work for the Israeli Army.
He was imprisoned but continued to help Israeli intelligence upon his release, getting paid $10,000 a mission.
As for Halawi, he claimed to have received phone calls from Tannous asking him to work for Israel but that he refused the offer and had informed Hizbullah about it. However, Hizbullah denied the allegations, according to the indictment.
Hizbullah has called for the death penalty for all suspects convicted of spying for Israel.
The wave of detentions began in April 2009 with the arrest of a former brigadier general of the General Security directorate.
Senior Lebanese security officials said the arrests dealt a major blow against Israel’s spying networks in Lebanon and that many of the suspects played key roles in identifying Hizbullah targets that were bombed during the 2006 summer war.
Other suspects have been charged with monitoring senior Hizbullah officials and at least one is alleged to have played a role in the 2004 assassination of a commander of the group.
Last week, a Lebanese man was sentenced to death for masterminding a bombing in southern Lebanon that killed a senior member of a Palestinian militant group and his brother in 2006. – Reuters, with The Daily Star