Iran executed by hanging on Saturday a British-Iranian sentenced to death for spying for security services british intelligencea “ruthless” act that “will not go unanswered”, according to the United Kingdom.
Alireza AkbariThe 61-year-old former senior Iranian defense official was convicted of “corruption on earth and undermining the country’s internal and external security by passing intelligence information” to the United Kingdom, the information agency Mizan Online said on Saturday. of the judicial authority.
His execution occurred three days after the announcement of the death sentence of this man, presented in Iran as a “key spy” of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), better known as MI6.
It’s about a “barbaric act” that “will not go unanswered”British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly said on Saturday. The British government “will summon the Iranian chargé d’affaires to convey our displeasure to him,” Cleverly added.
For his part, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak denounced on Twitter a “ruthless and cowardly” condemnation while Amnesty International described the execution as an “atrocious attack” by Iran on the “right to life”.
High positions|
According to official Iranian mediaAlireza Akbari He held senior positions in the Iranian security and defense apparatus. This veteran of the war between Iran and Iraq (1980-1988) was among other deputy defense ministers for External relationshipshead of a unit in a ministerial research center and adviser to the commander of the Navy, the Irna news agency said, without giving dates.
In February 2019, the official newspaper of the Iranian government had published an interview with Alireza Akbari introducing him as a “former deputy defense minister” under the presidency of Mohammad Khatami (1997-2005).
The defense minister at the time was Ali Shamkhani, the current secretary of the Supreme National Security Council. Akbari was detained between March 2019 and March 2020, according to the Irna agency. The Mizan agency claimed that he had received payments of more than two million dollars for his services.
Iranian media released a video in which he appears to be seen talking to people who would be british contacts. These people would have asked him, among other things, for information about the nuclear physicist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, assassinated near Tehran in 2020 in an attack on his convoy of which
Iran blamed Israel.
Iran frequently announces the arrest of agents suspected of working for foreign intelligence services. Four people accused of cooperating with Israeli intelligence services were executed in December.
Relations between Iran and the United Kingdom have been strained in recent years by the detention of several dual nationals.
Iran has been rocked for months by protests sparked by the death on September 16 of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian Kurdish woman, after being arrested for violating the Islamic Republic’s strict dress code for women.
Iranian justice has confirmed the death sentences of 18 people in connection with the protests, according to an AFP tally based on official announcements. Four of them have already been executed, sparking an international outcry.
AFP
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