Judiciary spokesman: Iran executes CIA spy
Iran’s Judiciary said it has executed a former employee of the Defense Ministry convicted of spying for the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and that another agent of American and Israeli spy services is now on death row.
Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Judiciary spokesman Gholamhossein Esmaeili announced that Reza Asgari, who had retired from the Defense Ministry’s Aerospace Industries Organization four years ago, was executed last week.
In the final years of his service, Asgari had established links with CIA and received money from the US spy agency in exchange for information about Iran’s missile program, he added, Press TV wrote.
“He was identified, convicted, and sentenced to death,” Esmaeili said.
Back on June 2019, Iran executed another employee for the Defense Ministry’s Aerospace Industries Organization on charges of spying for the CIA and the White House.
Jalal Hajizavar was dismissed nine years ago and had explicitly confessed that he had collaborated with the CIA and spied for the United States in return for money.
The Judiciary spokesman was also asked on Tuesday about the case of Mahmoud Mousavi-majd, who has been sentenced to death for spying on Iranian military advisers in Syria on behalf of CIA and Mossad.
The death penalty, he said, is yet to be carried out.
Mousavi-majd has been found guilty of providing information to US and Israeli spy services on the whereabouts of General Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), who was assassinated in Baghdad in January 2020.
Elsewhere in his remarks, Esmaeili announced the approval of the death penalties handed to three people, who had been arrested in connection with the 2019 riots in Iran.
Two of them were arrested at the scene of an armed robbery, he said, noting that they filmed their criminal acts of torching banks, buses and public places and sent them to news agencies abroad.
Violent riots hit several Iranian cities in late 2019 following protests prompted by gasoline rationing and price hikes.