Four men executed in Iran for spying for Israel

Four members of Iran’s Kurdish minority, accused of spying for Israel, were hanged on Monday, despite a campaign on their behalf by human rights groups, who called their trial a ‘inequitable.

The four men were arrested on July 23, 2022 while they were preparing an operation against a Defense Ministry center in Isfahan, a large city in central Iran, on behalf of the Mossad, the Mizan Online agency reported. of the judicial authority.

The Ministry of Intelligence then announced that it had “identified a network of agents of the Zionist spy organization, all of whose members had been arrested,” according to Mizan.

Sentenced to death in September 2023, they were hanged at dawn on Monday.

According to the judicial agency, the four men had been recruited by Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, “about a year and a half before the operation.” They were then sent to African countries for “training courses in the military centers of these countries”.

Mossad officers were present at these training sessions, said the agency, which did not mention their belonging to the Kurdish ethnic group, which is highly discriminated against within the Islamic Republic and whose members are condemned to death in a manner disproportionate, according to several human rights organizations.

The execution of the four men, all aged under 30, seemed imminent, as their relatives were summoned on Sunday for a final meeting before their hanging at Ghezel Hesar prison, in the town of Karaj, near Tehran.

It occurs in a context of an increase in hangings in Iran, where, according to the same NGOs, two people were executed on average every day in January.

According to Amnesty International, which describes the four men as “Iranian Kurdish dissidents”, the death sentence was pronounced against them “following a manifestly unfair secret trial”. They were also forced to make “confessions” on Iranian television, according to Amnesty.

Iran also “relentlessly harassed and intimidated their families for defending their loved ones,” the NGO added.

65 executions in 2024

Their execution “is based on confessions obtained under torture and without a fair trial. It is considered an extrajudicial execution,” said Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, director of the Norway-based group Iran Human Rights (IHR), which estimates the number of detainees already hanged in 2024 at 65.

“I will never forgive or forget what happened today!” “, commented on X Joanna Taimasi, the wife of one of the four men, who now lives outside Iran and has campaigned in recent days for their lives to be spared.

Aged 26 to 28 and from Kurdish-populated areas of western Iran, they had been “deprived of their fundamental rights to legal representation, visits and even communication with their families”, a denounced the Kurdish rights association Hengaw.

“Even by the standards of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the minimum requirements of a fair trial had not been met in their case,” Hengaw said.

In an open letter, 20 human rights groups, including IHR, urged UN Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights Nada Al-Nashif to “reconsider” her planned visit in Iran on Friday, given the “alarming” increase in the number of executions and the risk that this trip could be used as a “propaganda tool” by Tehran.

The same criticisms were made last week after Mohammad Ghobadlou was hanged, even though the young Iranian suffered from “mental problems” and the judgment against him was overturned.

Iran and Israel have been engaged in a latent war for years.

Israel accuses Iran – which denies it – of wanting to acquire the atomic bomb and says it is seeking by all means to prevent it. Israel also wants to counter Iran’s influence in the Middle East.

Tehran in return accuses him of being behind a series of sabotage and assassinations targeting its nuclear program.

In August 2023, Iran claimed to have foiled a “very complex” project launched by the Mossad to “sabotage” its ballistic missile industry. A few months earlier, in February, Tehran accused Israel of being responsible for a drone attack on a military site in Isfahan.

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