Dirar Abu Sisi
Photo: AP
Israel says holding missing Palestinian
State says 42-year old Palestinian engineer abducted in Ukraine being interrogated in prison
Israel admitted for the first time Sunday that it is holding a 42-year old Palestinian engineer who went missing in Ukraine over a month ago. The state said it had detained Dirar Abu Sisi in order to interrogate him.
The admission came after the Petah Tikva Magistrates' Court decided to partially lift a gag order imposed on the case.
On March 10 the UN accused Israel of having kidnapped Abu Sisi. A spokeswoman for Ukraine's Interior Ministry, Viktoria Kushnir, said he went missing "under unknown circumstances" in the early hours of Feb. 19 after boarding a train in the eastern city of Kharkiv bound for the capital Kiev.
Abu Sisi's Ukrainian wife, Veronika, 32, claimed that the Israeli secret service Mossad carried out the abduction in order to sabotage a key electric power plant in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip where he worked as a senior manager.
"I don't suspect it, I am sure of it," Abu Sisi told the AP in a telephone interview. "My husband was the heart of the only electric station in Gaza, or rather its brain. It's a strategic object and they wanted to disable it."
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