Azzam Azzam

Azzam Azzam (Arabic: عزام عزام‎, Levantine Arabic: [ʕazˈzaːm], Hebrew: עזאם עזאם‎) (born 1962) is an Israeli Druze who was convicted in Egypt of spying for Israel, and jailed for eight years. He maintained his innocence throughout the ordeal, and since, no credible evidence was presented at his trial, and no additional evidence was ever released.

Arrest and trial

Azzam is a textile worker from the town of Maghar in Israel. He had been sent to Egypt as an employee of an Israeli textile company, to work at a textile plant which was a joint business venture of Israeli management and Egyptian labor, when he was arrested in Cairo in November 1996.

Originally accused of industrial espionage, he was later accused of using women's underwear soaked in invisible ink to pass information to Israel's intelligence agency Mossad.

The trial opened on April 24, 1997, but was postponed until May 18, when it was discovered that the lawyer for his Egyptian co-defendant, Emad Abdel-Hamid Ismail, was not present. In the interim, the Egyptian Lawyers' Syndicate received a memo signed by twelve attorneys, stating that by defending Azzam, his lawyer, Farid Deeb, "polluted the distinguished history of the Lawyers' Syndicate". The letter demanded that disciplinary action be carried out against Deeb for "undertaking the defense of the Israeli spy"; in response the Syndicate decided to bring Deeb before its disciplinary committee on June 11. (Al-Wafd, May 14).