Mossad’s Prisoner X leaked secrets to Hezbollah: Der Spiegel

A prominent German magazine says the Australian-Israeli Mossad agent called Prisoner X had leaked confidential information to Lebanese resistance group Hezbollah before his death.

News weekly Der Spiegel said on Sunday that Ben Zygier, who was found dead in a high security prison in Tel Aviv in late 2010, had passed information to Hezbollah about Lebanese nationals who were spying for Israel.

According to the report, the arrest of Lebanese nationals Ziad al-Homsi and Mustafa Ali Awadeh in May 2009 on charges of spying for Israel was a result of secrets leaked by Zygier.

Australian reporter Trevor Bormann on February 12 revealed the identity of the Prisoner X who had been “found hanged in a cell with state-of-the-art surveillance systems” near Tel Aviv in late 2010.

For two years, a gag order prevented journalists in Israel from telling the story of Prisoner X. The order was partially lifted by an Israeli court two days after the report by Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). Gag orders and military censorship are common in Israel.

Originally born in Melbourne, the 34-year-old man with a dual Australian-Israeli citizenship had worked for the Israeli spy agency, Mossad, since 2003.

Following the revelation, the Tel Aviv regime was forced to admit that Zygier had been jailed under a false identity “for security reasons.”

According to a report by The New York Times on February 14, Zygier was among the 26 suspects in a murder plot in which Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a Hamas official, was tracked and killed in his hotel room hours after his arrival in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates, in January 2010.