Four men and one woman were executed in Iran for allegedly being “saboteurs” hired by Israel’s secret service Mossad. The executions took place by order of the judiciary. Just two weeks ago, another man was sentenced to death for similar reasons. The background of the story is always a long-distance war between two Middle Eastern countries that maintain mutual accusations of espionage.
Accused of collaborating with the “Zionist regime”
According to the Iranian judiciary news agency Mizan, “Four members of a sabotage group affiliated with the Zionist regime were hanged this morning” in the West Azerbaijan province in northwestern Iran. The semi-official Tasnim news agency announced the identities of the four people executed: Vafa Hanareh, Aram Omari and Rahman Parhazo. A woman named Nasim Namazi was also killed along with them. The agency added that these were the main detainees in a case involving 10 defendants, but it was unclear whether other suspects would also face execution. The four were sentenced to death on charges of “corruption” for “moharebeh”, that is, waging war against God, and “collaboration with the Zionist regime”. On December 16, a man also found guilty of working for the Mossad was executed in the southeastern province of Sistan-Baluchistan. In this case, the judiciary did not disclose the identity of the person, but limited itself to saying that he was convicted of “intelligence cooperation and espionage for the benefit of the enemy Zionist regime”. In December 2022, the Islamic Republic executed four more people found guilty of collaborating with Israeli intelligence services. According to human rights groups, including Amnesty International, Iran is the country that sentences the most people to death annually after China. There are also convictions against homosexuals and those who protest the regime. A Swedish diplomat working for the European Union delegation in Tehran, also accused of spying for Israel, also faces the death penalty.
Video with confession
The judges found that the group of those executed “committed extensive actions against the security of the country under the leadership of the Mossad.” The official IRNA news agency published an almost eight-minute-long video showing the men confessing to their alleged collaboration with a Mossad officer in neighboring Turkey who went by the two names Tony and Arash. In the video, the four said their mission included kidnapping, threatening and burning vehicles and homes, Reuters reported. Iranian intelligence kept the group under close surveillance for at least four months from January 2022 until their arrest in May last year, when they were “transferred from a neighboring country to Iran”. “They were training us for bigger missions,” an unidentified young man in a blue striped shirt said in the clip. At the time of the arrests, Iranian media reported that the ten people under investigation, who communicated with Mossad officials via video call, “set fire to the cars and houses of people connected to the security apparatus and received money to take photographs and sent them to themselves.” Mossad agents.”
Nuclear program under attack
Iran and Israel have been waging a kind of “shadow war” for years, with mutual accusations of sabotage, espionage, and financial aid to terrorist groups (including the Palestinian group Hamas) that have intensified in the past two years. Iran has accused Israel of carrying out numerous attacks on facilities linked to its nuclear program and killing nuclear scientists in recent years. Israel neither denied nor confirmed the accusations. In July, Iran’s intelligence ministry said it had arrested a network of agents working for Israel before they carried out sabotage in sensitive areas. In August this year, Tehran accused Israel of being behind “one of the biggest sabotage plans” against the defense industry and missile production. In January last year, Israel announced that it had busted an Iranian spy ring that recruited Israeli women to photograph sensitive sites through the social media platform Facebook. In April 2021, Tehran described the power outage at the Natanz uranium enrichment facility in the desert in Isfahan province as an act of “nuclear terrorism”, asserting Israeli responsibility behind the “attack”.
Source: Today IT
Karen Clayton is a seasoned journalist and author at The Nation Update, with a focus on world news and current events. She has a background in international relations, which gives her a deep understanding of the political, economic and social factors that shape the global landscape. She writes about a wide range of topics, including conflicts, political upheavals, and economic trends, as well as humanitarian crisis and human rights issues.
