JERUSALEM: The plot thickened today over a secret trip by Israel’s prime minister, as his office admitted it had misled the public about his whereabouts but stopped short of denying reports he had stolen away to Russia to discuss arms sales to Iran.

“The prime minister was busy with a confidential and classified activity,” Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a statement.

“Having had the best intentions, his military attache... acted to defend that activity and did this through an announcement to the media” that said he had spent the day at a security facility in Israel, it said.

But the statement did not deny media reports that Netanyahu had flown to Russia aboard a private plane on Monday to discuss Moscow’s arms sales to arch-foes Syria and Iran.

In Moscow, the Russian authorities said the Israeli premier had met neither his counterpart Vladimir Putin nor President Dmitry Medvedev, but did not explicitly deny the trip itself.

The mystery around the prime minister’s day-long disappearance from public view is unfolding alongside another — that the Arctic Sea cargo ship supposedly seized by pirates and later recovered by Russia was secretly carrying S-300 anti-aircraft missile systems bound for Iran.

Russia has denied that the ship was carrying S-300s and Russian investigators have announced that their inspection of the vessel turned up only its official cargo of timber.

The Arctic Sea, a Maltese-flagged vessel with a Russian crew, was hijacked near Sweden in late July before being recovered by the Russian navy in the Atlantic Ocean several weeks later.

Officially the ship was carrying a load of timber from Finland to Algeria, but speculation has raged that it was carrying weapons or even nuclear materials.

Israel has for years tried to convince Russia not

to sell S-300 surface-to-air missile systems to Iran, which the Jewish state fears Tehran could deploy around its controversial nuclear sites.

Russia agreed to sell the systems to Tehran several years ago. Following an August 18 visit, Israeli President Shimon Peres said he had secured a promise from Medvedev that Russia would review its decision.