http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5j0DgkozyHVo_m7oG-Id2RxXnfWSQ

JERUSALEM - Israel helped an Iranian academic with links to the Islamic republic's controversial nuclear programme to defect, army radio reported on Saturday, citing a deputy minister.

Ayoub Kara, deputy minister for development in the Negev and Galilee, told a meeting at Ramat Gan near Tel Aviv that a scholar with ties to Iran's nuclear programme recently asked for asylum in Israel after it helped him to defect.

"It is too soon to provide further details," Kara said, adding only that the unidentified academic was "now in a friendly country."

"Israel will help all those who want to remove the strategic nuclear threat Iran poses not only to our country, but to the entire civilised and democratic world," the radio reported Kara as saying.

Neither Israel nor the United States has ruled out military action to thwart Iran's nuclear ambitions, which Tehran insists are peaceful but which the world powers believe mask a drive to manufacture an atomic weapon.

Israel is widely believed to be the sole nuclear-armed power in the Middle East, albeit undeclared, and pursues a policy of ambiguity over whether it has an atomic arsenal.

The Jewish state has been linked previously to reports of defections of key personnel believed to have ties with Iran's nuclear ambitions.

In March 2007, an ex-head of Israel's foreign intelligence service Mossad said that a former Iranian general who went missing in Turkey had probably defected.

"Ali Reza Asghari has probably defected to the West," said Danny Yatom, who was head of Mossad from 1996 until 1998.

Mystery surrounded Asghari's disappearance, amid accusations by Tehran that he was snatched by Western spy agencies and suggestions in the Israeli media that Mossad may have been involved.

Asghari, a former deputy defence minister said to have information about Iran's nuclear programme, is believed to have gone missing in Istanbul after checking into a luxury hotel.

In January this year a leading Iranian nuclear scientist was murdered in Tehran in a rare bomb attack that the government quickly blamed on "mercenaries" in the pay of arch-foes the United States and Israel.

Massoud Ali Mohammadi, a particle physics professor at prestigious Tehran University, died when a bomb strapped to a motorcycle was triggered by remote control as he was getting into his car outside his home.

Washington dismissed Iran's allegation of US involvement as "absurd."

And earlier this month, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said another Iranian nuclear scientist, Shahram Amiri, who Tehran says was kidnapped by US agents, is currently in the United States.

In March, ABC news reported that Amiri, who disappeared in June 2009 after arriving in Saudi Arabia on a pilgrimage, had defected and was working with the CIA. Iranian officials maintain that Amiri was abducted from Saudi Arabia.