Israeli prosecutors said Thursday they would indict a Gaza engineer who was abducted in the Ukraine, allegedly by Mossad agents, and is now being held in Israel, dpa reported.
Dirar Abu Sisi, 42, has denied allegations reported this week by German news magazine Der Spiegel that he may hold valuable information about Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier held in Gaza for more than four-and-a-half years.
He appeared before reporters and cameraman at a court in Petah Tiqwa, east of Tel Aviv, for the first time since his disappearance more than 40 days ago.
"I'm innocent," Abu Sisi said in Arabic, wearing a short beard, moustache and glasses. He said he had "no links" to what Israel was attributing to him and that suspicions against him were "all a lie."
"I don't know anything about Shalit," Abu Sisi told the reporters in English.
He also sent his love to his wife and six children.
Israel has imposed a gag order on the case and on the circumstances surrounding his capture.
No details have been published of the charges, which are scheduled to be brought before him early next week, only that they were "grave."
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has described Abu Sisi as "a Hamas man."
The premier did not talk about any links with the captured Israeli soldier, saying only that Abu Sisi had provided "valuable information" to his interrogators.
Defence Minister Ehud Barak, for his part explicitly ruled out a direct link between Abu Sisi and Shalit, or the soldier's detention at an unknown location in Gaza.
There is "no direct link," he told Israel Radio, "but he is man who has intimate internal knowledge about what is going on in Hamas, and that is of a value."
Abu Sisi's Ukrainian wife, Veronica, denied her husband had any link to the radical Islamist movement that is ruling Gaza.
Hamas has nevertheless condemned Abu Sisi's capture. He disappeared while riding a passenger train from the eastern Ukranian city of Kharkiv to the capital Kiev on February 18.
No comment has been heard so far from the Palestinian Authority.
Shalit was snatched on June 25, 2006 in a cross-border raid led by Hamas. He has since been held in Gaza, largely incommunicado.
Hamas, which seized sole control of the strip in June 2007, has demanded that Israel free about 1,000 Palestinian prisoners in return for his release.
Negotiations over a prisoner swap have so far come to naught.
Israel confirmed only last week that it was holding Abu Sisi.
His lawyers argue that his capture was "illegal," although they are not authorized to discuss any details.
The United Nations has called his apparent forced removal from the former Soviet republic "extremely worrying."
"He is a registered international refugee, and it is our job to keep track of him," Maksym Butkevych, a spokesman for the UN High Commission for Refugees in Ukraine, said last month.
Abu Sisi comes from the Jabaliya refugee camp, north of Gaza City.