RAMALLAH, March 5 (JMCC) - The chief engineer of
Gaza's only power plant has been kidnapped by the Mossad and is being held secretly in
Israel, reports blogger Richard Silverstein.
Dirar Abu Seesi disappeared from a train in the Ukraine on February 18 while visiting his wife in her native country. She has charged Israeli authorities with kidnapping her husband, saying that he had no personal conflicts and was not wealthy enough to be kidnapped for money.
On Thursday, however, Silverstein
reported on his
Tikun-Olam blog that an Israeli source confirmed that Abu Seesi is indeed being held incommunicado in Israel.
My source does not yet tell me what he’s charged with, but one can presume if a detainee is being interrogated it’s on an intelligence-security related issue. Usually when they arrest a Palestinian outside Israel or who’s recently been outside Israel they accuse him of contact with a forbidden organization (which usually means Hezbollah or Hamas). It’s possible they’ve cooked up such charges in this case.
But Abu Seesi may be a different case. As the chief engineer of Gaza’s power plant he may know a good deal of technical information Israel would like to have about the plant, how it operates, how it can be shut down. In fact, given the success of Stuxnet in penetrating Iran’s nuclear facilities, Israel would have a definite interest in being able to penetrate the Gaza plant with a remote program and shut it down during hostilities without having to destroy it as it did during Operation Cast Lead.
Or they may be concocting a story by which he’s engaged in some terror plot which would exploit his skills as a civil engineer.