Egypt has halted the entire print run of a newspaper after a former spy claimed in an interview that intelligence agencies used captured Israelis in secret prisoner-swap deals.
The privately owned Al-Masry Al-Youm, based in Cairo, tried to run a posthumous interview with the former intelligence officer Refaat Jibril until it was pulled on the order of military censors.
In the interview Mr Jibril, who died in 2009, was quoted as saying Egypt had never executed “a single” Israeli spy and had traded them secretly for Palestinians held in Israeli jails.
The claim flies in the face of official records, which say Egypt was executing Israeli spies up to the 1980s.
Mr Jibril, who said that the intelligence agencies were involved in Egypt’s economic,