JERUSALEM - Mordechai Vanunu, about to complete an 18-year jail term for spilling Israeli nuclear secrets, has called for the destruction of Israel's secretive Dimona reactor, newspapers reported on Monday.

"Just like the Iraqi reactor was destroyed, I want the Israeli reactor destroyed," Vanunu, referring to Israel's 1981 bombing near Baghdad, was quoted as saying in a videotaped meeting recently with security officers.

"I am defending the Arab world," he said in the interview, according to a transcript carried by newspapers. The tape was to be broadcast later in the day.

Vanunu, a former technician at the Dimona reactor, was jailed in 1986 as a traitor after disclosing information to Britain's Sunday Times newspaper which led analysts to conclude Israel had produced as many as 200 nuclear bombs at the facility.

Israel maintains a strategic ambiguity over its nuclear program in an attempt to ward off its foes while avoiding a regional arms race. It has kept the Dimona facility, in southern Israel, closed to international inspection. Vanunu, 49, is expected to be placed under restrictions as soon as he is released on Wednesday, the government having decided to bar him from leaving the country, tap his phone and bar his access to the press for a probationary period.

Release of the videotape appeared aimed at bolstering the government's case in a court challenge Israel's civil liberties union is mounting on Vanunu's behalf against the edicts.

Challenging Israel's right to exist, he declared: "There is no need for a Jewish state. There should be a Palestinian state. Whoever wants to be Jewish can live anywhere."

Vanunu said he hoped to fight the restrictions and move overseas. He denied having anything sensitive left to divulge and threatened to defy some restrictions using the Internet.

"I've been inside for 20 years, everything has changed. Science has advanced...so what I saw seems very outdated to me," Vanunu said.

Vanunu also maintained he was neither a spy nor a traitor.

"I wanted to inform the world about what happened. It's not treason," and outside Israel "five or six billion people (see me)...as a positive figure."

Asked why he had chosen to convert to Christianity back in the 1980s, Vanunu replied: "I think Islam and Judaism are both the same backward religion...Christianity is progressive."

Copyright © 2004 Reuters Limited.

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