●Arrest of Charbel Qazzi at Alfa: Israel inside the mobile network

In late June 2010 the Lebanese army arrested Charbel Qazzi, head of the transmission and maintenance department at the state-owned company "Alfa", on the charge of dealing with Israel since the 1990s; he confessed to planting Israeli software and chips in the transmission stations and handing over the network's passwords, and his colleague Tarek Rabaa was then arrested. The telecommunications minister Charbel Nahas called it the most dangerous espionage operation in Lebanon's history, and Qazzi was sentenced to seven years' hard labour.