This week, the undercover agent Mr. Nettles had contacted when he left prison supplied him with 2,000 pounds of fertilizer.
Inmates can have books and a television; a 13-inch flat panel set costs $182.90 in a prison supply catalog.
So Shahin, Kamil and others were busy trying to rewrite history, generating backdated orders from the Interior Ministry, turning a military barracks at Abu Qir naval base (near Alexandria) into a prison, supplying it with records of visits and a batch of prison officers.
"It's a media event for the local sheriff's department," said Bob Barker, president of the Bob Barker Company of Fuquay Varina, N.C., the nation's leading prison-supplies firm.
This can change if funds and facilities were made available for moderate imams to enter prisons, supply literature, mentor inmates and facilitate visits from prominent Muslim scholars — as has happened recently in Saudi Arabia.
Many are so despised by inmates in the nearby prison which supplies them with their meals, that they often find broken glass in their food.
Neither Ukrainian authorities nor the separatists deliver food or medicines to the prison, with supplies provided only by inmates' relatives, and on rare occasions by volunteer organisations.
A Honduran man who pleaded guilty in Denver to selling heroin was sentenced to 20 years in prison for supplying the drugs that killed a professional bull rider and two other people last year.
In March, the judge who presided over this trial, Robert B. Kugler of Federal District Court in Camden, sentenced a friend of the Duka brothers to 20 months in prison, for supplying the brothers with guns and ammunition.
In January an entrepreneur in Shanghai was sentenced to two years in prison for supplying e-mail addresses in China to a prodemocracy, U.S.-based Chinese on-line newsletter.
The jury concluded unanimously that Mr Duggan was armed - a man has already gone to prison for supplying the gun - but by a majority they decided he threw the firearm away as police surrounded him.
