Israel to gag and confine Vanunu after release from prison

1.00pm - By MEGAN GOLDIN

JERUSALEM - Israel has banned nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu from leaving the country for a year after he completes an 18-year jail term on Wednesday, on the grounds that he has more state secrets to spill.

The former nuclear technician, convicted of treason for revealing Israel's nuclear secrets to a British newspaper, would also be barred from speaking to foreign nationals without prior permission for a six month period, officials said.

A Defence Ministry statement issued on Tuesday said the restrictions were due to "a tangible danger...that Vanunu wishes to divulge state secrets, secrets that he has not yet been divulged and which have not been previously published".

Vanunu, a 49-year-old Christian convert who has been disowned by his family, told security officers in an audio tape broadcast on television that he wants to live abroad and has nothing more to reveal about Israel's nuclear capabilities.

However, in comments that angered many Israelis, he also called for Israel's nuclear reactor to be destroyed, said the Jewish state should not exist and called Judaism a backward religion.

Vanunu was jailed in 1986 as a traitor after disclosing information to Britain's Sunday Times which led analysts to conclude Israel had produced more than 100 nuclear warheads.

He spent 12 years of his sentence in solitary confinement. The revelations embarrassed Israel which has maintained a strategic ambiguity over its nuclear programme in an attempt to ward off its foes while avoiding a regional arms race. Israel has kept the nuclear reactor in Dimona -- where Vanunu worked for nine years until he was fired in 1985 -- closed to international inspection.

The Defence Ministry said the restrictions could be renewed if the state considered Vanunu a threat when they expired.

"The keys are in Vanunu's hands. The reissuance of the restrictions depends on the steps that he takes, on his conduct and on future violations of the law," the statement said.

The list of prohibitions slapped on Vanunu were less severe than those originally mooted after Attorney General Menachem Mazuz removed some restrictions out of concern they could be overturned by the Supreme Court, Israeli media reported.

The restrictions listed by the Defence Ministry included a requirement that Vanunu would have to inform authorities of his place of residence and movements and would be forbidden from approaching border crossings out of Israel.

There was no mention of restrictions against Vanunu approaching foreign embassies. Israeli security officials had expressed concern that Vanunu would seek diplomatic asylum at a foreign mission in Tel Aviv.

Upon his release from prison, Vanunu will live in a luxury block of flats overlooking the sea in Jaffa, southern Tel Aviv, where his supporters and adopted American parents have rented him an apartment, television reports said.

Scores of supporters including anti-nuclear campaigners have arrived in Israel to welcome Vanunu upon his release from jail. They say the Israeli restrictions on Vanunu are an attempt to gag legitimate anti-nuclear activism.

"The bans and restrictions constitute a disproportionate and unwarranted blow to the liberty of a freed convict," said the Association for Civil Rights in Israel.

The grey-haired Vanunu will have served his full 18-year term. Security officials say he will still be bound by a non-disclosure agreement he signed when he was hired to work at the Dimona reactor in 1976.

- REUTERS