Egypt has charged an Irishman with spying for Israel after an Egyptian nuclear engineer was arrested at the state's Atomic Energy Agency, a government statement has claimed.
The statement names the Irishman as Brian Peter and revealed that a Japanese national, named Shiro Izo, was also charged.
The Department of Foreign Affairs told ireland.comthat it is investigating claims made by the Egyptian authorities that Mr Peter and Mr Izo recruited nuclear technician Mohamed Sayed Saber Ali (35) to provide information on his workplace at Inshas - the site of one of Egypt's small research nuclear reactors.
Egypt claims that Mr Ali took documents from Inshas and handed them over to Mr Peter in exchange for thousands of dollars.
Egyptian security officials arrested Mr Ali on February 18th when he arrived at Cairo airport from one of several trips to Hong Kong, where he had meetings with his contacts, the statement added.
Mr Peter and Mr Izo allegedly told Mr Ali at one meeting in Hong Kong that they wanted him to work for their company from inside the Atomic Energy Agency, it said.
"The first accused (Ali) said that he understood from the course of this meeting that the company referred to was no more than a front for the activity of Israeli intelligence," the statement read.
It alleges that at a later meeting in Hong Kong in December 2006, Mr Ali gave Mr Peter documents containing secret information about the Atomic Energy Agency and the nuclear reactor at Inshas.
Egypt also claims that during his final trip to Hong Kong, in February this year, Israeli intelligence gave Mr Ali lie detection tests for two days as a condition for him receiving computer software for hacking into the Atomic Energy Agency's computer systems.
Mr Ali's contacts were interested in information about the capability of the Inshas reactor, how many hours it operated, the type of experiments conducted with it, any technical problems with the reactor and reasons for them, according to the statement.
Egypt's reactors are under IAEA supervision, and the UN agency has had no serious complaints about Egyptian compliance with the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Egypt dropped plans for nuclear power stations in the 1980s, but the government last year announced plans to take another look at nuclear power as an alternative to fossil fuels.
An Egyptian man with Canadian citizenship is on trial in Cairo in a separate case of alleged spying for Israel. He denies the charges and says a confession was forced out of him.