An Iranian who spied for U.S. and Israeli intelligence on slain Revolutionary Guards commander Qassem Soleimani has been sentenced to loss of life, Iran stated on Tuesday, including the case was not linked to Soleimani’s killing earlier this 12 months.
On Jan. 3, a U.S. drone strike in Iraq killed Soleimani, chief of the Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force. Washington blamed Soleimani for masterminding assaults by Iran-aligned militias on U.S. forces within the area.
“Mahmoud Mousavi-Majd, one of many spies for the CIA and the Mossad, has been sentenced to loss of life.… He had shared details about the whereabouts of martyr Soleimani with our enemies,” judiciary spokesman Gholamhossein Esmaili stated in a televised information convention.
“He handed on safety data to the Israeli and American intelligence businesses about Iran’s armed forces, notably the Guards.”
Esmaili stated Mousavi-Majd’s loss of life sentence has been upheld by a supreme court docket and “he will likely be executed quickly.”
Arrest in 2018
Later, the judiciary stated in an announcement that Mousavi-Majd’s conviction was not linked to “the terrorist act of the U.S. authorities” in Soleimani’s killing in Iraq.
“All the authorized proceedings within the case of this spy … had been carried out lengthy earlier than the martyrdom of Soleimani,” the assertion stated, including that Mousavi-Majd had been arrested in October 2018.
Officials haven’t stated whether or not Mousavi-Majd’s case is linked to Iran’s announcement in the summertime of 2019 that it had captured 17 spies working for the CIA, a few of whom it stated had been sentenced to loss of life.
Nor have they stated whether or not Mousavi-Majd’s case is linked to Iran’s announcement in February of this 12 months that Iran had sentenced to loss of life a person for spying for the CIA and making an attempt to cross on details about Tehran’s nuclear program.
Soleimani’s killing led to a peak in confrontation between Iran and the United States. Iran retaliated with a rocket assault on an Iraqi air base the place U.S. forces had been stationed. Hours later, Iranian forces on excessive alert mistakenly shot down a Ukrainian passenger airliner taking off from Tehran.
