Breaking: Iran Set To Execute Spy Convicted Of Helping US To Kill Top Iranian General Qassem Soleimani
An Iranian national convicted of spying for the US and Israel by helping target top Iranian general Qassem Soleimani will be executed soon, Iran’s judiciary said on Tuesday.
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 Qassem Soleimani,”
He was said to have collected large sums of money from both Israel’s Mossad and the CIA, judiciary spokesman Gholamhossein Esmaili told a televised news conference.
Soleimani headed the Quds Force, the foreign operations arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, and was killed in January in a US drone strike near Baghdad airport.
The strike also killed Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, deputy commander of Iran-backed militias in Iraq known as the Popular Mobilisation Forces, and five others, including the militias’ airport protocol officer, Mohammed Reda.
Iran later retaliated for Soleimani’s killing with a ballistic missile strike targeting US forces in Iraq. That same night, the Guard accidentally shot down a Ukrainian jetliner in Tehran, killing 176 people.
However, Iran said Tuesday it will execute a man whose conviction for spying for the US by helping target a top Iranian general has been upheld by the supreme court.
Majd’s death sentence has been upheld by the supreme court and “will be carried out soon”, he added, AFP reported.
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.
Tehran announced in December it had arrested eight people “linked to the CIA” and involved in nationwide street protests that erupted the previous month over a surprise petrol price hike.
