The Iranian Justice announced this Saturday that it had executed, despite protests from the international community, former Deputy Defense Minister Alireza Akbari, convicted three days ago of spying for the United Kingdom’s secret services.
According to the agency of the Iranian judiciary, designated as Mizan, Alireza Akbari, who held the post of Deputy Defense Minister during the term of former reformist president Mohamed Katami (1997/2005), was executed by hanging.
Akbari had been sentenced by a court on Wednesday for “spying for MI6”, the British secret services abroad, allegedly in exchange for 2.16 million euros.
The 61-year-old convict, arrested three years ago, appealed the sentence before the Federal Supreme Court, which rejected the appeal.
Iran’s Interior Ministry described Akbari, who had dual British and Iranian nationality, “as one of the most important cases of infiltration” of the Persian country’s security.
Iranian authorities released a heavily redacted video of Akbari discussing the allegations, similar to other videos that dissidents have described as forced confessions.
On Friday, both Britain and the United States criticized Akbari’s death sentence.
Deputy State Department spokesman Vedant Patel said Akbari “was drugged, tortured while in custody, interrogated for thousands of hours and forced to make false confessions.”
The announcement of Akbari’s execution comes as Iran is being rocked by a wave of protests following the death of a young Iranian Kurdish man in police custody.
Mahsa Amini, 22, was attacked and detained on the street in Tehran on September 13 by the so-called morality police (responsible for enforcing the strict women’s dress code), because although she was wearing the mandatory ‘hijab’ (veil Islamic) leave part of your hair visible. Hours after being arrested, she was transported in a coma to a hospital, where she would die three days later.
However, the protests in recent months have grown in size and have evolved, now calling for the end of the theocratic regime called the “Islamic Republic”, founded in 1979.
Tehran has accused the United States, Israel, the United Kingdom, France and Germany of being behind the protests, in which nearly 500 people died as a result of police repression.
At least four people were executed for alleged participation in the demonstrations and 17 were sentenced to death.
According to Amnesty International (AI), Iran is one of the countries that executes the most people.
In May last year, the organization reported that Iran recorded the highest known number of executions in 2021 since 2017, indicating that the country had executed at least 314 people, an increase from at least 246 deaths recorded in 2020. .
Source: TSF
