Cairo: An Egyptian court has jailed a retired general for claiming the nation’s spies deliberately fed now-deposed Islamist president Mohammad Mursi false intelligence because he was a “traitor,” state media reported Thursday.

Tharwat Guda, a former officer in general intelligence, was jailed for a year Wednesday in a military trial sparked by a complaint from his former institution that he had disclosed information “damaging to national security.”

Unclear is how he could know anything about the matter, as he retired in 2010, the year before long-time president Hosni Mubarak was driven from power and Mursi elected to replace him.

At issue was an interview he gave to private newspaper Al Watan in September, state news agency MENA reported.

When asked whether the intelligence services had “conspired” against Mursi by feeding him false information, he said: “No. The intelligence services did not conspire against Mursi, it was he who conspired against Egypt.

“We knew he was a traitor even before he became president, so why give him information?”

The army ousted Mursi, Egypt’s first democratically elected president, in July 2013 after only a year in power, as millions demanded his resignation for allegedly monopolising power and ruining an already dilapidated economy.

But Mursi’s Muslim Brotherhood and its supporters have claimed that state institutions and services worked in a way to ensure that his presidency was a failure.

Guda claims Al Watan misquoted him, but the daily says it is ready to release the audio recording of his interview.

Since Mursi’s ouster, the new authorities led by President Abdul Fattah Al Sissi are regularly accused by rights groups of using the judiciary to repress Islamist backers of Mursi.

Mursi himself is on trial in three separate cases, including one on charges of espionage in which he is accused of conspiring with the Palestinian Hamas movement and Iran to destabilise Egypt.

He will also be tried in a separate case for leaking documents of national security to Qatar, a key backer of his erstwhile government.

A government crackdown targeting Mursi and his Muslim Brotherhood movement since his ouster has left more than 1,400 people dead, thousands jailed and hundreds sentenced to death.