PARIS (AFP) — A French website threatened Wednesday to publish a report allegedly showing that US authorities had broken a ring of Israeli spies trying to burrow into the US Justice and Defence Departments, if US and Israeli officials continued to deny the allegations.

“It seems irresponsible for us to publish it, but if the denials go on, we could put the report on our Internet site and in so doing possibly blacken the names of the people most exposed,” the editor of the Intelligence Online site, Guillaume Dasquie, said.

The 61-page document was a technical counter-espionage report “notably with the names of agents, details about them and their families, and the identities of the US agents who worked on the case,” he warned.

The website, which specialises in covering the world of international espionage, had on Monday given the thrust of the report, said to have come from a special task force set up within the US Justice Department.

It claimed that US agents had put Israelis living in Arkansas, California, Florida and Texas — many of them under student visas — under surveillance from April last year after suspicions were raised that they were trying to infiltrate agencies like the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Around 120 Israelis have so far been arrested or deported in the top-secret operation, which was ongoing.

But US and Israeli authorities have dismissed the allegations — although their denials have not addressed the specific aspects raised by Intelligence Online.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation said on Tuesday that no Israeli had been charged with spying in the United States.

But an FBI spokesman, Bill Carter, did admit that a group of Israeli students “allegedly were involved in activity outside their visas and they were removed from the US based on that fact.”

An Israeli foreign ministry spokesman, Emmanuel Nachson, on Wednesday said of Intelligence Online's claims: “It's rubbish, and this nonsense doesn't deserve any further comment.”

And a DEA spokesman in Washington, Rogene Waite, would go no further than to say there had been “suspect” activities in several of the DEA's divisions.

But Dasquie was sticking by the report.

He intimated that US authorities were engaging in sophistry by saying the Israelis were not charged with spying — something that would almost never happen if the United States were to expel spies working for a friendly nation such as Israel.

A simple deportation of individuals who had their papers in order only reinforced the spying allegations, he argued.

“For the overwhelming majority of the ring's members expelled, there was no problem at all with visas, and in the lists we only found a few minor cases of expired visas,” he said.

Dasquie insisted that “the document we have in our possession details not only the identities of the members of this network, but also their activities in the Israeli army, and even their serial numbers in the intellgence services, their passport numbers and their validity, and their visas and their validity.”

The FBI was also contradicting itself with some of the information it was giving out, particularly by referring only to arrests on foreigners that had been made in the United States since the Sept. 11 attacks.

“The Justice Department report that we are basing this on is dated June-July 2001. Well before the mass arrests after Sept. 11,” he said.