The Abu Sisi family insists he is no Hamas terrorist.
For almost a year, Dirar Abu Sisi’s home has been a jail cell about the size of a large bed in an Israeli prison. He spends his time praying, writing letters to his family and, he says, regretting the decision he made last winter to leave the Gaza Strip and settle in Ukraine with his wife and children.
“I’m really sorry that heartless politicians and officials often decide the fate of ordinary people in Ukraine, cruelly destroying their lives,” he told the Kyiv Post in answers to questions asked through his lawyer.
Ukrainian and Israeli authorities have repeatedly failed to answer questions about how Palestinian engineer Abu Sisi disappeared from Ukrainian territory one day last February and ended up in an Israeli jail the next. Now he is on trial, charged with being a terrorist and crimes against the security of Israel.
A Kyiv Post account of the disappearance, compiled from numerous state sources, witnesses and acquaintances of Abu Sisi, has revealed how he ended up there. It also raises questions about Israel’s version that Abu Sisi is a dangerous terrorist who helped Hamas develop long-range rockets to target Israeli territory.
Abu Sisi, 42, and his Ukrainian wife, Veronika, say they decided to relocate to Ukraine in 2008 following a devastating Israeli bombing campaign that began just days after she had given birth to the couple’s sixth child.
He had been working as chief engineer at the Gaza Strip’s only power plant, a job he was well-equipped to do with his doctorate in engineering from a university in Kharkiv.
But the family decided it was time to move away from danger.
“My wife and I didn’t see a future there for us or our children,” Abu Sisi said in his first interview with a news organization since his arrest.
He arrived in Ukraine on Jan. 27, and went to Kharkiv to apply for a residency permit. After submitting his application, he set off for Kyiv by night train on Feb. 18.
Sharing a sleeping compartment with the Palestinian was Andriy Makarenko, a Ukrainian who works for a German nongovernmental organization.
Ten minutes after the train left Kharkiv at 10:55 p.m. on Feb. 18, Makarenko said, two men in dark jackets entered the compartment, demanded Abu Sisi’s passport and asked him to go with them.
Ukrainian Veronika Abu Sisi. (AFP)
“He was a bit baffled. He stood up from the bunk and started to go, even forgetting to put his shoes on. Then he left without saying a word,” Makarenko said.
Then a third man entered the compartment, Makarenko said, searched Abu Sisi’s belongings and flashed an identity card from the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) when challenged.
The SBU denied involvement in the disappearance. The conductor, who according to Makarenko was present during the arrest, told the Kyiv Post on March 15 in a trembling voice that he hadn’t seen any abduction in his carriage.
Three weeks later, United Nations officials reported that Abu Sisi had turned up in an Israeli jail shortly after his disappearance, and expressed concern about the way he was brought there. Israeli authorities refused to comment on the case. Ukrainian police investigated the disappearance, but one month later decided not to open a case, saying no crime had been committed.
On March 16, Ukraine’s border guard service wrote to parliamentary ombudswoman Nina Karpachova that it has “no information about him [Abu Sisi] crossing the Ukrainian border” on the way out of the country. A copy of the letter was provided to the Kyiv Post by Abu Sisi’s wife.
The statement was oblique, but its meaning was clear: Abu Sisi had been moved across the border illegally.
The events appear to follow the pattern of abduction-style arrests carried out in foreign countries by Israel’s Mossad spy agency. In 1960, Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann was snatched from Argentina. Mordechai Vanunu, a scientist, was seized from Italy in 1986 after he revealed details of Israel’s nuclear weapons program.
Abu Sisi and his lawyer, Tal Linoy, are barred by an Israeli court ruling from revealing how he was detained.
Despite the authorities’ continued denials, critics say Ukraine must have been involved at some level.
The Palestinian ambassador to Ukraine, Mohammed Alasaad, said it was an “international crime,” perpetrated by Israel and “some Ukrainian citizens.”
“You can’t kidnap a person in a country without other people [from the state] being involved,” he told the Kyiv Post.
Ukrainian Foreign Ministry officials say they have not received a reply to requests sent to Israel through diplomatic channels for information about Abu Sisi.
The jailed Dirar Abu Sisi drew his six children from his Israeli jail cell. (Courtesy)
Nevertheless, relations between Israel and Ukraine significantly warmed in 2011. The countries implemented a visa-free agreement and Ukrainian diplomats say they expect a bilateral free trade agreement to be sealed this year.
Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych made a three-day visit to Israel at the end of November, two months after Israeli President Shimon Peres had visited Yalta.
Richard Silverstein, the U.S. blogger who first reported Abu Sisi’s imprisonment, linked the increasingly close relations between the two countries with “cooperation” in seizing Abu Sisi.
Veronika Abu Sisi also blames Ukraine, claiming her husband became a victim of “dirty political games.”
“Six little children, Ukrainian citizens, can’t think anything good about their second motherland, where their father was kidnapped,” she wrote to the Kyiv Post from Gaza Strip, where she is currently staying with her children.
The story about how Abu Sisi was delivered to Israel still remains one of the secrets in his trial. Israeli prosecutors “claimed relations between the two states could be harmed if all the data about how the Palestinian ended up in jail were published,” Linoy, his lawyer, said.
Abu Sisi stands accused of assisting Hamas, a militant Palestinian political group considered a terrorist organization by Israel. According to partial transcripts of his interrogation by police, released by a court following a request by two Israeli newspapers in August, Abu Sisi admitted helping Hamas to increase the range and accuracy of rockets that were launched from Gaza onto Israeli territory.
He later denied those allegations, while his lawyer claimed Abu Sisi was forced into confessing by “illegal methods.” According to Linoy, the Palestinian started a hunger strike one day, protesting against the way he was questioned, but was then “chained to bed by his hands and feet, and was lying so for 14 hours until he agreed to eat again.” The Israeli Interior Ministry and Foreign Ministry could not be reached for comment on numbers provided on their website and by the Israeli Embassy in Kyiv.
The Israeli Embassy in Kyiv said it would only agree to an interview with the ambassador by email or allowing changes to be made to comments. The Kyiv Post rejected the conditions.
According to the prosecutors’ indictment, Abu Sisi in 1995 learned rocket building in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, where he received access to the local military academy and attended several courses there.
However, a closer examination of Abu Sisi’s time and studies in Ukraine shows a number of inconsistencies in Israel’s claims.
The indictment names a professor called “Konstantin Petrovich” as the man who supervised the Palestinian’s doctoral thesis. It also alleges that he arranged lessons for Abu Sisi to study rocket engineering at an institution called the “Military Engineering Academy.”
The Kyiv Post found no evidence of any institution of this name. There is a military university in Kharkiv, called Kharkiv University of Air Forces.
Officials from military educational institutions in Kharkiv said it was impossible for a foreigner to receive access to top-secret rocket studies in Ukraine.
“It’s impossible just to attend our courses even for our citizens as they contain state secrets,” said Gennadiy Pevtsov, deputy head of the Kharkiv University of Air Forces.
The “Konstantin Petrovich” referred to in the indictment is likely Konstantin Petrovich Vlasov, who was the chair at the university where Abu Sisi studied – the Kharkiv Municipal Academy.
Philip Govorov, a professor at the academy who taught Abu Sisi, told the Kyiv Post that he remembered the Palestinian.
Abu Sisi’s “specialization was called ‘Power Stations, Networks and Systems.’ As you see, it had nothing in common with the military sphere,” Govorov said. This is confirmed by a scan of his degree certificate sent by his wife, issued on July 2, 1999 by the National Technical University of Ukraine in Kyiv, and a recording of him defending his thesis there on June 6, 1999 seen by the Kyiv Post.
Another version of the reason for Abu Sisi’s arrest appeared at first in German magazine Der Spiegel last year, which quoted security sources as saying that he was seized as the Israelis believed he had information about their soldier Gilad Shalit, who for over five years had been imprisoned by Hamas militants.
Shalit has since been released in an unconnected prisoner swap. Abu Sisi was not on the prisoner release list, indicating that Hamas doesn’t consider him important, his lawyer Linoy said.
The British Broadcasting Corporation reported in August that Abu Sisi was detained by Hamas before his trip to Ukraine. Silverstein, the U.S. blogger with sources in Israeli security services, said he believes the Palestinian tried to escape to Ukraine from Hamas pressure to work for the group, and as a result “Israel was fooled by Hamas into kidnapping him.” Realizing that they arrested him wrongly, “the Israelis concocted a totally false story about Abu Sisi being a rocket engineer,” Silverstein added.
His wife and Shadi Otman, a friend who knew him during his time in Ukraine, refute claims that he was a Hamas member.
Now, Abu Sisi is still waiting for the secret trial to start calling its first witnesses.
Veronika Abu Sisi has already filed lawsuits against the Ukrainian authorities for not following extradition procedures and said she was currently planning to file a suit against Ukraine in European Court of Human Rights.
She has mostly been able to communicate with her husband only through rare, strictly censored letters. On Jan. 30 she was allowed a 10-minute phone conversation, the first time they had spoken since April last year.
Abu Sisi has already lost almost 30 kilograms of weight, suffers from kidney disease and high blood pressure, according to his lawyer. Now he sits, yellow-faced and depressed, in his tiny, poorly ventilated cell, the lawyer added.
“I have the feeling my life has stopped since I ended up here,” Abu Sisi said.
Kyiv Post staff writer Oksana Grytsenko can be reached at [email protected].
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