Hazem Abdel Azim, a former candidate for the post of communications minister, said Thursday in a phone call to a TV program that Egyptian authorities are still wiretapping citizens' phones, despite interior ministry claims that wiretapping has ended since the revolution.
Abdel Azim was excluded from Prime Minister Essam Sharaf's cabinet reshuffle after a local newspaper reported that he holds a 5 percent share in a telecommunications company that may have business ties to Israel.
He said the former State Security Investigation Services (SSIS), which is now known as the National Security Agency, wiretapped a phone call between him and a manager at the company where he formerly held the 5 percent share.
Abdel Azim said he had called to ask the manager whether the new owners of the company had really entered into a partnership with an Israeli company.
He said that after their phone call, someone called the woman and threatened to harm her if she appeared on television and uncovered the truth.
The news was published Tuesday on Al-Youm Al-Sabea's news website.
Adbel Azim said the incident proves that wiretapping has not yet ended in Egypt.
A video that includes a phone call between Khaled Salah, editor-in-chief of Al-Youm Al-Sabea and allegedly one of the stakeholders of the newspaper went viral on YouTube after the revolution. The phone call gave the impression that the editors of the paper, one of the top ten news websites in Egypt according to the ranking website Alexa, had been influenced by state security in its coverage and was therefore unreliable.
Many believe that Abdel Azim was wiretapped because of his political involvement in the 25 January revolution which toppled former President Hosni Mubarak.
Abdel Azim is also a supporter of presidential hopeful Mohamed ElBaradei, who on Thursday denounced Abdel Azim's exclusion from the new cabinet.
