A man accused of being a spy told Egyptian interrogators that he recruited several new agents while living in Canada, targeting gays and those he knew were in financial trouble within Arab communities.
The alleged scheme was to find Canadians to help him spy for Israel's intelligence service, the Mossad.
The strange and sensational case against Mohamed Essam Ghoneim el-Attar is told in an interrogation transcript viewed yesterday in Cairo by The Globe and Mail. The file alleges the Egyptian suspect is a gay Zionist, who turned his back on Islam and worked to undermine the security of his homeland.
According to the file, the 31-year-old Egyptian-Canadian admitted that he used his position as a teller at a Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce branch in Toronto to identify potential recruits. The records further allege that Mr. el-Attar told interrogators that he was a homosexual who married and divorced at least four times after arriving in Canada, in 2002.
The dossier further alleges Mr. el-Attar was under regular surveillance by Egypt's intelligence service, known as the mukhabarat, the entire time he was in Canada. His Cairo lawyer says he was shown photographs of his client living in Toronto, Vancouver and Niagara Falls, pictures he believes were taken by Egyptian agents.
The interrogation session took place some time last month at an unknown location in Egypt, before Mr. el-Attar had seen his lawyer, his family or anyone from the Canadian embassy.
Human-rights activists say the confession should be treated with extreme skepticism because of the widespread use of torture in Egypt. The Israeli government has said it has never heard of Mr. el-Attar.
Officials from Tel Aviv have repeatedly denounced Egypt's claims that it caught a Mossad agent, describing them as baseless fabrication.
Sources say that Canadian intelligence is also treating the case with skepticism, and that Ottawa has information that the suspect was first arrested on charges completely unrelated to spying.
Mr. el-Attar spent fours years in Canada before he was arrested at a Cairo airport on Jan. 1. His case grabbed international headlines this month after Egyptian prosecutors began publicizing claims that they caught a spy.
The accused saw his lawyer, Ragab Mohammed, for the first time this week. Members of Cairo's legal community are expressing surprise that a previously unknown lawyer from a tiny firm is handling such a high-profile case.
Interviewed in Cairo yesterday, the lawyer stated he was convinced of his client's guilt.
"This guy said even more than the interrogators asked him. He made the case for them -- they didn't need to torture him," Mr. Mohammed said, sitting in his office on the fourth floor of a crumbling Cairo apartment block.
A can of aerosol disinfectant sat on his cluttered desk. A calendar on a nearby table sat unflipped since October of 2006.
Mr. Mohammed said his client was "telling the truth" when he made the confession.
He said he had received no contact from the Canadian government and had the impression that "the Canadians are not very interested in this case."
The lawyer predicted that his client would be sentenced to between 15 and 25 years in prison but "only because this is peacetime."
"If this was wartime, the sentence would be death," he said. (Egypt signed a peace agreement with Israel in 1979.)
According to interrogator's notes, the mukhabarat had been following Mr. el-Attar since the day he left Cairo for Turkey in early 2002. It's unclear why authorities would have been suspicious of a young man who left Egypt after an apparent falling out with his family.
According to the confession transcript, Mr. el-Attar went to the Israeli embassy in Ankara three days after he landed and asked for a job.
The case file says that the Israelis put him through a series of tests -- which included writing book reports -- and submitted him to a lie-detector test.
The Israelis advised the young man to convert to Christianity, the transcript says, and introduced him to Catholic leaders in Turkey who schooled him in the religion.
The dossier says that Mr. el-Attar cited his new religion, and the that fact he is gay, in applying to the United Nations for refugee status from Egypt. The UN refugee agency won't speak to details of the claim, but confirms it relocated the asylum seeker to Canada.
At the very least, the travel patterns described in the dossier coincide with accounts from Canadians who say they knew the young man in Vancouver.
Anne-Rose Sims, a Vancouver woman who believes she met the suspect at her church in 2003, said "I don't think he could ever be a spy."
But she found his story strange.
She was contacted by The Globe and Mail after she e-mailed the newspaper to say the alleged spy making headlines sounded a lot like a man she met through her church.
The young Egyptian she knew as "William" told a story she immediately doubted. According to her, he said he had gotten a Christian cross tattooed on his arm, which prompted his Muslim father to lock him in the house. The young man said he jumped through a window to get away, driving his family's BMW right to the Cairo airport.
She said he got close to churchgoers, including an Egyptian professor who said he thought the young man was "strange."
After a few months, he disappeared.
According to the Egyptian dossier, after "six or seven" months in Vancouver, Mr. el-Attar moved to Toronto, where he took jobs at a fast-food restaurant near the Salahuddin mosque in Toronto. Later, one of his handlers allegedly got him a job at CIBC, which is not commenting on the case.
Egyptian documents allege that Mr. el-Attar was paid $500 for each espionage report he filed on the Toronto Arab community.
In Cairo yesterday, his lawyer said that Mr. el-Attar was directed to focus his efforts on Arabs whose native states bordered Israel: Syrians, Lebanese, Jordanians, Egyptians and Palestinians.
The lawyer said Mr. el-Attar flew to Cairo on Jan. 1 at the behest of his handlers who apparently had asked him to make amends with his family. From there, he was supposed to travel to Israel.
The lawyer said that, when arrested, his client was "in shock" about the amount of information the Egyptian authorities had compiled and felt it was best to confess.
A trial date has been set for Feb. 24 in Cairo.
Mark MacKinnon
Colin Freeze