Iran’s regime is in confusion over a death sentence against a “collaborator” and its connection with the January 3 assassination of top commander Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani (pictured) by a US drone strike.
Judiciary spokesman Gholam-Hossein Esmaili announced on Tuesday that Seyed Mahmoud Mousavi-Majd had provided foreign intelligence services with details of the movements of Soleimani, the head of the Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force.
Soleimani, who led Iranian military and political operations throughout the Middle East, was killed in the drone attack on his car outside Baghdad International Airport.
Mahmoud Mousavi-Majd, one of the spies for the CIA and the Mossad, has been sentenced to death….He had shared information about the whereabouts of martyr Soleimani with our enemies….
He passed on security information to the Israeli and American intelligence agencies about Iran’s armed forces, particularly the Guards.
But hours later, the judiciary’s Media Center said Mousavi-Majd’s case had nothing to do with the assassination. It noted that the defendant was arrested on October 10, 2018 and initially sentenced to death on August 25, 2019.
Mousavi-Majd was retried after the Supreme Court found the first trial was faulty. The Court has endorsed the imposition of the death sentence in the second trial.
Mehdi Keshtdar, the managing director of Mizan Online, tweeted that Mousavi-Majd was in detention at the time of Soleimani’s killing. However, he claimed the prisoner had in the past informed the CIA of the “whereabouts and movements of military commanders such as Qassem Soleimani at various times”.
Iranian officials said last summer that 17 “spies” working for the CIA had been captured, and some had been sentenced to death.
