Dirar Abu Sisi, 42, disappeared last month "under unknown circumstances"
and police are trying to establish where he is, a Ukrainian Interior
Ministry statement said.
"According to his wife, the missing man may be abroad," it said. "The
Interior Ministry is taking steps to establish his location."
His Ukrainian wife, Veronica, 32, told Reuters she believed that Israeli
intelligence service Mossad agents had snatched him somewhere between
Ukraine's northeastern city of Kharkov and the capital Kiev.
"Two men escorted him away," she said. She believed the reason was
because he was promising to be successful in his job as a manager at one of
the main power plants in Hamas-ruled Gaza. "This is a strategic object,"
she said.
A spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in Ukraine, Maksim
Butkeyvch, told Reuters: "We don't know what happened on the ground.
But we have serious concerns ... It is a very serious issue for us."
Israeli officials declined to comment, citing a court-issued gag order. But an
official for an Israeli human rights group said Abu Sisi was being held at a
prison in southern Israel and has been in Israeli custody since Feb. 19.
Abu Sisi, while a manager at the main power plant in Gaza, was not otherwise
known to have any political affiliation with the Islamist group.
Earlier, his sister, Suzanne Abu Sisi, 45, told Reuters her brother had been
abducted from a train in Ukraine last month, then transferred to an Israeli
prison in the town of Ashkelon.
"Friends there told us Dirar had been seized by six people who had
abducted him from the train en route between Kharkov and Kiev," she
told Reuters.
"We know now that he is in prison in Israel, so they were the ones who
abducted him. We do not know why they did it," she said.
The sister, who lives in Gaza, said her brother had gone to Ukraine with his
Ukrainian wife and six children to apply for citizenship there.
The engineer's wife has since filed a complaint with Ukrainian authorities,
she said, and he has been assigned an Israeli lawyer who, under the gag
order, is barred from speaking to reporters.
A Hamas source confirmed they had information Abu Sisi had been detained by
Israel. The Palestinian embassy in Ukraine declined to comment on the
matter.
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