Iran on Tuesday said that it will execute the man convicted of spying for the US and Israel by helping target top Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, as the decision has been upheld by the supreme court.
AFP reports, Mahmoud Mousavi Majd was convicted of spying on Iran’s armed forces “especially the Quds Force and on the whereabouts and movements of martyr General Qasem Soleimani” for large sums of money from both Israel’s Mossad and the US Central Intelligence Agency, judiciary spokesman Gholamhossein Esmaili told a televised news conference. Majd’s death sentence has been upheld by the supreme court and “will be carried out soon”, he added.
Iran in February handed down a similar sentence for Amir Rahimpour, another man convicted of spying for the US and conspiring to sell information on Iran’s nuclear programme.
It also said in July 2019 that it had dismantled a CIA spy ring, arresting 17 suspects between March 2018 and March 2019 and sentencing some of them to death. US President Donald Trump at the time dismissed the claim as “totally false”.
General Qasem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) elite Quds Force, was killed in a US attack ordered by President Donald Trump in January, 2020.
Pentagon officials had said that at the direction of the US President, the military had taken the decisive defensive action to protect US personnel abroad by killing the Iranian General.
“The strike was aimed at deterring future Iranian attack plans… The US will continue to take all necessary action to protect our people and our interests wherever they are around the world,” it added.
Soleimani was among the eight people who were killed in a rocket attack by the US on Baghdad international airport. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said that Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the second-in-command of the Hashd Shaabi or the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), was also killed along with Soleimani in the strike that targeted their vehicle on the Baghdad International Airport road, the Tehran-based Press TV reported.