Israel sabotaged Egypt’s Internet, says alleged Mossad spy

Undersea cable

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
Israeli sabotage was behind the nationwide crippling of Egypt’s Internet in 2008, according to an alleged Mossad agent. The accused agent, Abdel Razeq Hussein Hassan, is an Egyptian businessman who was arrested earlier this year by Egyptian counterintelligence and is accused of working for the Israeli spy agency. Two of his alleged Israeli handlers, Joseph Daymour and Idid Moushay, are reportedly on the run and are wanted by the Egyptian government.  Hassan is due to go on trial next month, but transcripts of his interrogation records have been leaked to Egyptian media. In one instance, Hassan appears to tell his police interrogators that a team of Mossad operatives deliberately cut two undersea cables about 5 miles off the north Egyptian port city of Alexandria, disrupting the country’s Internet service for several days. An article in Britain’s The Daily Telegraph claims erroneously that the disruptions, occurred in December of 2008 and were “blamed at the time on damage […] caused by a ship’s anchor”. In reality, the undersea cables were cut on January 30, 2008, and there was no connection to anchors or anything similar, which does raise suspicions. Still, the possibility must be considered that Hassan’s revelation may have been extracted by his interrogators through torture, or that it may be part of a controlled leak —true, overstated, or downright false— by Egyptian counterintelligence. Whatever the truth behind this is, what is missing is the strategic motive that would have caused the Mossad to sabotage Egypt’s nationwide Internet data delivery at a time when the governments of the two countries were entering a period of rapprochement.