Mordechai Vanunu

Mordechai Vanunu was born in 1954 in Marrakech

Vanunu was born in Marrakech, Morocco, the second of 11 children in an Orthodox Jewish family. In 1963 the family moved to Israel and settled in Beersheba, where his father ran a stall in the market. He attended religious schools, including the Ohel Shlomo yeshiva high school.

He served in the Combat Engineering Corps from 1971 to 1974. He then studied physics at Tel Aviv University for about a year but left after failing two exams. Later he studied philosophy at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

In 1976 he began work at the Negev Nuclear Research Center near Dimona, where he secretly took photographs. He was dismissed in 1985 and traveled abroad, settling for a time in Sydney, where he converted to Christianity in 1986. In 1986 he gave his material to the Sunday Times, and Mossad agents lured him to Rome, abducted him and brought him to Israel.

In 1988 a closed court convicted him of treason and aggravated espionage and sentenced him to 18 years in prison, much of it in solitary confinement. He was released in 2004 under restrictions on travel and contact with foreigners. He was later convicted of violating these terms and jailed again in 2010.