This Friday, Iran executed four people, including a woman, sentenced to death by a court of the Islamic Republic after being found guilty of spying for the Mossad, Israel's Intelligence services, according to the official Iranian news agency. , IRNA. “Four members of a sabotage group linked to the Zionist regime were hanged this morning” in the northwestern Iranian province of West Azerbaijan, stated the official Mizan Online website, attached to the Judiciary. Those executed had been arrested in October of last year along with six other people, of whom it is not specified if they will also be taken to the gallows.
“Members of this group received money from Zionist entity agents and Mossad officers on several occasions in exchange for tasks they completed, and communicated directly with officers” of Israeli intelligence, the IRNA report continues. . According to the Judiciary, the members of “that network (…) carried out tasks assigned to them by the Zionist intelligence service with the intention of disrupting national security through methods of murder, kidnapping, destruction and arson.”
The semi-official Tasnim news agency has identified the four executed as Vafa Hanareh, Aram Omari and Rahman Parhazo, along with the woman, Nasim Namazi. A video shared by IRNA shows the men confessing their alleged cooperation with a Mossad officer in Turkey. They said their mission involved kidnapping, threatening and setting fire to vehicles and homes of unidentified targets, as well as stealing mobile phones. International human rights organizations and Iranians in exile have often denounced that Iranian courts sentence numerous people to hanging solely on the basis of confessions extracted under torture.
This is the latest in a series of executions and hanging sentences in Iran. On the 16th, the Iranian authorities applied the death penalty against a man convicted of spying for foreign intelligence services, including the Mossad. Iran is the country in the world that applies the death penalty the most in relation to its population, with 576 executions carried out in 2022, a substantial increase from 314 the previous year, according to Amnesty International. So far in 2023, the country has executed more than 750 people, most of them for crimes related to drug trafficking and possession, according to human rights groups. Another group, Iran Human Rights (IHR), based in Norway, counted at least 600 executions as of October.
The Islamic Republic and Israel are bitter enemies, they consider each other a mutual existential threat, compete for regional hegemony and maintain a covert war with cyberattacks, assassinations and sabotage. Tensions have risen since last October with the offensive launched by Israel on the Gaza Strip.
In August, Iran accused Israel of being behind “one of the largest sabotage plots” against its defense industry and missile production. In July, its Intelligence Ministry claimed to have detained a network of agents working for Israel before they could carry out sabotage at sensitive locations. Israel has neither denied nor confirmed the allegations.
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In January last year, Israel said it had dismantled an Iranian spy network that recruited Israeli women through Facebook to access restricted sites. In April 2021, Tehran blamed Israel for an act of “nuclear terrorism” for the disruption of power at its Natanz uranium enrichment facility in the desert of the central province of Isfahan, about 400 kilometers south of Tehran.
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