He was accused of passing information to the UK about senior officials such as the scientist Fakhrizadeh
Iran swore revenge in 2020 for the murder of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a scientist considered the mastermind of the Islamic republic’s nuclear weapons program, and has already exacted it. The Islamic regime reported the execution of Alireza Akbari, a 61-year-old former senior regime official, after being convicted of “corruption on Earth and harming the country’s internal and external security by transmitting intelligence information,” the page revealed. website of the judiciary Mizan Online. The Islamic republic accused him of passing information to the UK on dozens of top officials, including Fakhrizadeh. The family denies it and denounces that it is a punishment for political reasons.
Akbari was described as a “super M16 spy” by the Iranian authorities and media and the Mizan portal revealed that he would have charged more than 2 million dollars for the services rendered. A veteran of the war with Iraq, a former member of the Revolutionary Guard and a former deputy defense minister, he was a senior regime official with a direct link to Ali Shamkhani, current head of security and defense minister from 1997 to 2005, when Akbari was his deputy. After a lifetime linked to the regime in senior positions related to defense, the nuclear program and national security, Akbari and his family moved to London a decade ago, where he became a dual citizen. His relatives defend that they gave him the passport for his investments and business in the country, from Tehran they assure that it was one more reward for his espionage work.
trip trap
In 2019 he returned to Iran for a visit and his brother Mehdi declared to ‘The New York Times’ that this trip was a trap by the Iranian intelligence services. The newspaper ‘The Guardian’ collected the words of the protagonist himself who said at that moment to his own that “I must return, I am a soldier and it is my duty”, since he would have received the request from his former boss to become an adviser on how the country had to respond to the decision of Donald Trump to withdraw the United States from the nuclear agreement with Iran.
Since he set foot in his native country, the interrogations began and his brother denounces that “the accusations against him are based purely on forced confessions under extreme duress.” He is not the first senior Iranian official to be detained on espionage charges, but it is rare for such cases to end with hanging.
Initially they accused him of conspiring with a foreign power, a crime that carried a maximum of 10 years in prison, but in 2021 the accusations were raised to “corruption on Earth”, a charge that carries the death penalty in the Islamic system. .
political execution
British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly had previously called for the execution to be halted, lamenting that “this is a politically motivated act by a barbaric regime that has complete disregard for human life.” The United States joined the condemnation and the special envoy for Iran, Robert Malley, called for an end to “unfair arrests, forced confessions, shameful trials and political executions.”
Following the Akbari case, the next on the spy execution list may be Ahmad Reza Djalali, a Swedish-Iranian citizen detained since 2016 and sentenced the following year to death on espionage charges. His family also denies it.
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