Iran’s judiciary says a “Mossad agent” has been sentenced to death for the assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists between 2010 and 2012.
Tehran Prosecutor Abbas Jafari Doulatabadi (pictured) said on Monday, “The person had several meetings with [the Israeli intelligence agency] Mossad and provided them with sensitive information about Iran’s military and nuclear sites in return for money and residency in Sweden.”
The prosecutor said the accused gave Mossad information about 30 nuclear and military scientists, including Massoud Ali Mohammadi, killed in January 2010 by a remote-controlled bomb attached to a motorcycle outside his home in Tehran. He claimed the suspect had several meetings with more than eight Mossad officers and provided them with “sensitive information” about Iran’s military sites and the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran.
The judiciary said the defendant was also linked to the assassination of nuclear engineer Majid Shahriari, killed in a bomb attack in November 2010.
Doulatabadi gave no further information about the identity of the detainee. One man was hanged in 2012 over the killings.
However, Amnesty International said that Ahmadreza Djalali, an Iranian doctor who studied and taught in Sweden, has been condemned to die on espionage charges. Amnesty said the court verdict asserted that Djalali worked with the Israeli Government and that it subsequently helped him obtain a residency permit in Sweden.
“We condemn the use of the death penalty in all its forms. The death penalty is an inhuman, cruel and irreversible punishment that has no place in modern law,” Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom said in an e-mail. Swedish officials said they have had raised the matter at high-level meetings in Stockholm and Tehran.
Djalali was arrested in April 2016 and held without access to a lawyer for seven months, three of which were in solitary confinement.
