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Nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu has urged Israel to let him leave the country and join his wife abroad. Vanunu was released in 2004 after 18 years in prison after talking to The Sunday Times about Israel’s secret nuclear programme. Israeli spies abducted Vanunu from Rome in a ‘honeytrap’ operation and transported him to Israel where he was jailed as a traitor after a secret trial. On 4 September, Channel 2, a Hebrew language station in Israel, broadcast an interview with Vanunu.

In it Vanunu told of how he met ‘Cindy’, the Mossad agent who lured him to Rome from were he was captured and taken Israel. Vanunu also told Channel 2 that he photographed the facility in order to ‘’inform the citizens of the Middle East, the world, and the state of Israel”.

He also denied being, in his words, “a foreign spy’” rather he claimed he acted ‘”because I thought it was the right of the people to know.”

‘‘I, Mordechai Vanunu, took the responsibility to inform the citizens of the nuclear danger.’’

Vanunu recently married a Norwegian professor and wishes to leave Israel.

“I have no more secrets to tell, and I want them to let me leave and go live abroad with my wife, and that’s the end of the story.”

Writing in the Guardian last year on the tenth anniversary of his release, Duncan Campbell said: “Vanunu has also been compared with another American who blew the whistle on what he regarded as his country’s immoral activities. Indeed he has often been described as the Israeli Daniel Ellsberg, to which the latter responds: “I can only say that I would be proud to be known as the American Vanunu, although my own possible sentence of 115 years for revealing state secrets [the Pentagon Papers] was averted by disclosure of government misconduct against me which pales next to the Israeli misconduct in assaulting, drugging and kidnapping Vanunu in the process of bringing him to trial, let alone the 11 years of solitary confinement he was forced to endure.”

Up until now the authorities have refused Mordechai permission to leave the country and his movements remain  limited (see my previous blogs).

(Parts of this story were sourced from David Knowles article, Press Gazette 7 September 2015)