This Convicted Israeli Ex Cabinet Minister Jailed For Smuggling Of Drugs & Espionage Lived & Was Recruited In Nigeria (pics)

Former Israeli cabinet minister Gonen Segev is to be jailed for 11 years after he admitted spying for Iran, Israel’s justice ministry says.

Segev, who served as energy minister in the 1990s, was allegedly recruited while working as a doctor in Nigeria.

He was accused of leaking details about Israeli officials and security sites.

Segev was detained in Equatorial Guinea in May and extradited to Israel. He pleaded guilty to serious espionage as part of a deal with prosecutors.

The 63-year-old will be formally sentenced at a hearing on 11 February.

There was no immediate comment from the Iranian authorities.

Ever since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, when religious hardliners came to power, Iran’s leaders have called for Israel’s elimination. Iran rejects Israel’s right to exist, considering it an illegitimate occupier of Muslim land.

In 2005, Segev was given a five-year prison sentence after being convicted of trying to smuggle 30,000 ecstasy pills from the Netherlands to Israel using a diplomatic passport with a falsified expiry date.

He also had his licence to practice medicine revoked, but he was allowed to work as a doctor in Nigeria when he moved there after his release from jail in 2007.

Israel’s internal security service, Shin Bet, said in June that Segev had confessed to making contact with Iranian embassy officials in Nigeria in 2012 and visiting Iran twice to meet his handlers.

He was allegedly given a classified communications system to send coded messages and passed on “information related to the energy sector, security sites in Israel and officials in political and security institutions”.

While Segev admitted to the charge of espionage he reportedly told investigators that he had been trying to ‘fool the Iranians and come back to Israel a hero.

An initial charge of “assisting an enemy during a time of war” was removed from his indictment as part of his plea bargain.

Further details of the case remain under a gag order.

“The district attorney’s office wants to reveal more details about the affair, and once it’s out, it will be clear that Segev indeed had contacts with Iranians, but not to aid them,” Segey’s legal team said.

“That is why the treason charge was removed from the amended indictment.”

More facts on the disgraced former cabinet minister 

Segev was born in Israel in 1956. He was a captain in the IDF and went on to study medicine at Ben Gurion University in the Negev and became a pediatrician.

He was elected to the Knesset in 1992, at the age of 35, as part of Raful Eitan’s now defunct Tzomet party.

He joined Yitzhak Rabin’s governing coalition in January 1995 and was rewarded with ministerial office: He headed the Energy and Infrastructure Ministry (now known as the Ministry of National Infrastructure, Energy, and Water Resources) until June 1996. His vote was critical in passing the Oslo II Accord in the Knesset in October 1995. He quit politics after losing his seat in the 1996 elections.He famously split that party in 1994 and set up the short-lived Yiud faction along with two other Tzomet MKs.

Segev then became a businessman, and was arrested in 2004 for attempting to smuggle 32,000 ecstasy (MDMA) tablets from the Netherlands into Israel. He also illegally extended his diplomatic license and committed several offenses involving use of credit cards.

The former minister was convicted in 2005 of drug smuggling, forgery and fraud. He received a five-year prison sentence as well as a $27,500 fine. He was released from prison in 2007 after a third of his sentence was cut due to satisfactory behavior in jail.

However, Segev could not go back to working as a doctor since his medical license was stripped from him shortly before his release. Segev appealed this decision to the Jerusalem District Court, but was rejected.

Immediately following his release, Segev left the country and has since been working as a doctor and a businessman in Nigeria. Hadashot TV said he had worked as a doctor for staffers at the Israeli embassy in Nigeria and for the local Jewish community.

In 2016, the Israeli Health Ministry rejected a request from Segev to reinstate his medical license in order for him to return to the country.

His attorney argued at the time that there were ministers who had committed offenses and still returned to government positions. He cited the example of current Interior Minister Aryeh Deri, who was previously jailed for bribery and yet returned to the very same ministerial position he held when he committed his crime.