VANUNU PLACED UNDER HOUSE ARREST FOR GIVING TV INTERVIEW

I24 NEWS – An Israeli court put nuclear whistle-blower Mordechai Vanunu under seven days’ house arrest Thursday for giving a TV interview more than a decade after completing an 18-year jail term, media said.

Army radio said he was arrested in the morning after an interview on privately owned Channel 2 last week in defiance of the terms of his 2004 release.

He later appeared in a Jerusalem court and was confined to his home for a week and barred from using the Internet, the radio said.

Court officials could not be reached for confirmation.

Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that the police have contacted Channel 2, seeking the full, unedited footage of the interview. Channel 2 has reportedly denied requests to give the footage to police on the principal of protecting their sources, and are taking the matter to court.

The former nuclear technician was jailed in 1986 for disclosing the inner workings of Israel’s Dimona nuclear plant to Britain’s Sunday Times newspaper.

In the Channel 2 interview Vanunu told the story of his 1986 capture in Rome after an undercover Mossad agent named ‘Cindy’ seduced him and convinced him to travel with her. He was ambushed and arrested in their Rome hotel room.

He spent more than 10 years of his sentence in solitary confinement.

In Friday’s interview, the content of which Channel 2 said was cleared for broadcast by the military censor, he said he longer has any secrets to spill and just wants to join his new bride in Norway.

“I got married three months ago to my wife who is in Norway,” he said.

“She is the wage-earner; she is the one who is working. She can’t live here,” Vanunu said. “I want to start living my life.”

He married Norwegian theology professor Kristin Joachimsen at a Lutheran church in Jerusalem on May 19.

Vanunu, 60, converted to Christianity shortly before being snatched by Mossad agents in Rome and smuggled to Israel.

Released in 2004, he was jailed again for 11 weeks in 2010 for breaking the terms of his release by meeting a foreigner, a prison official said.

In 2011, the High Court barred him from emigrating on the grounds that he still poses a threat to state security.

He is barred from speaking to journalists but has repeatedly given interviews to foreign media, while shunning the Israeli press until the Channel 2 appearance.

Israel is the Middle East’s sole if undeclared nuclear power, refusing to confirm or deny that it has such weapons.

It has refused to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty or to allow international surveillance of the Dimona plant in the Negev desert of southern Israel.