Israeli scribe convicted in leak

TEL AVIV - Agence France-Presse

Uri Blau, a reporter with Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, was convicted yesterday, under a plea bargain of possessing classified military documents. Blau was convicted at Tel Aviv District Court for possessing secret army papers that he received from a former soldier who was subsequently jailed on charges of spying. As part of the plea bargain, which was agreed with the State Prosecutor’s office on July 5, Blau agreed to admit to the charge of possessing secret information without intending to harm state security.

Sentencing will not take place until September. “This is a precedent-setting prosecution of a journalist for doing his job,” Jack Hen, one of his legal representatives said, Former soldier Anat Kam handed some 1,800 documents to Blau who used some of them as the source for an article in 2008 which said troops had been ordered to carry out targeted killings of Palestinian militants in violation of a Supreme Court order. Kam was sentenced to four and a half years in jail in 2011.