No word on whether spy can attend father’s funeral

SOUTH BEND, Ind. (AP) — A spokesman for the U.S. Bureau of Prisons refused to say Monday whether a former U.S. Navy intelligence analyst convicted of spying for Israel has been allowed to leave prison to attend his father’s funeral in Indiana.

The White House had spurned Israeli requests to let Jonathan Pollard visit his father before he died Saturday.

Pollard was a civilian intelligence analyst for the Navy when he copied and gave to his Israeli handlers enough classified documents to fill a walk-in closet.

Arrested in 1985 after unsuccessfully seeking refuge at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, Pollard was convicted and sentenced to life in prison two years later. He is scheduled for release in 2015, according to a U.S. Justice Department website.

U.S. Bureau of Prisons spokesman Chris Burke said Monday that an inmate’s request to attend a funeral would typically be considered by the prison warden, and that information on whether permission was granted cannot be released until after the event.

“For security reasons we don’t comment on the movement of inmates at all until after it happens, when we’ll confirm that it happened or didn’t happen,” Burke said.

Denise Simmons, a spokeswoman for Butner Federal Correctional Complex in N.C., said she could not comment on Pollard’s status at the prison, saying it is not public information.

Before he died, Morris Pollard, 95, a retired biology professor at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, said he couldn’t sleep at night because of his son’s incarceration. He called it “an overwhelming miscarriage of justice.”