US says former Air Force officer sent intel to Iran
WASHINGTON, Feb 13, (Agencies): A former counterintelligence agent with the US Air Force has been accused of revealing classified information to Iran.
The Justice Department has announced an indictment against Monica Elfriede Witt, who defected to Iran in 2013 and is currently at-large.
Also charged are four Iranian hackers. Prosecutors say they targeted former colleagues of Witt’s in the intelligence community. The indictment says the four Iranians were acting on behalf of the government-linked Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Assistant Attorney General John Demers, the head of the Justice Department’s national security division, says, “It is a sad day for America when one of its citizens betrays our country.”
Meanwhile, a suicide bombing targeting a bus carrying personnel of Iran’s elite paramilitary Revolutionary Guard force killed at least 20 people and wounded 20 in the country’s southeast, state media reported.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack, which came on the day of a US-led conference in Warsaw that included discussions on what America describes as Iran’s malign influence across the wider Mideast.
The state-run IRNA news agency, citing what it described as an “informed source,” reported the attack on the Guard in Iran’s Sistan and Baluchistan province.
The province, which lies on a major opium trafficking route, has seen occasional clashes between Iranian forces and Baluch separatists, as well as drug traffickers.
The Guard is a major economic and military power in Iran, answerable only to the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
While Iran has been enmeshed in the wars engulfing Syria and neighboring Iraq, it largely has avoided the bloodshed plaguing the region. In 2009, more than 40 people, including six Guard commanders, were killed in a suicide attack by Sunni extremists in Sistan and Baluchistan province.
A coordinated June 7, 2017 Islamic State group assault on Parliament and the shrine of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. At least 18 people were killed and more than 50 wounded.
And most recently, an attack on a military parade in September in Iran’s oil-rich southwest killed over 20 and wounded over 60.
Dismissing US objections, judges at the International Court of Justice on Wednesday ruled that the UN body has jurisdiction to hear a claim by Iran to recover $1.75 billion in assets frozen by Washington.
Iran has argued that sanctions imposed in May by the administration of US President Donald Trump violate terms of a 1955 Treaty of Amity between the two countries, which Washington has said it will back out of.