Iran executes British-Iranian national Alireza
Akbari accused of spying
UK prime minister Rishi Sunak says execution was a
‘callous and cowardly act, carried out by a barbaric regime’
Guardian
staff and agencies
Sat 14 Jan
2023 00.54 EST
Iran has
executed British-Iranian national Alireza Akbari after sentencing him to death
on charges of spying for Britain, the country’s judicial news agency reported.
“Alireza Akbari,
who was sentenced to death on charges of corruption on earth and extensive
action against the country’s internal and external security through espionage
for the British government’s intelligence service … was executed,” the Mizan
news agency reported.
UK prime
minister Rishi Sunak called it a “cowardly act, carried out by a barbaric
regime with no respect for the human rights of their own people.”
Foreign
secretary James Cleverly said it would not go unchallenged.
“This
barbaric act deserves condemnation in the strongest possible terms.”
On Friday,
Cleverly said that Iran must not follow through with the execution of Akbari, a
former Iranian deputy defence minister.
Britain
described the death sentence as politically motivated and called for his
immediate release.
In an audio
recording broadcast by BBC Persian on Wednesday, Akbari said he had confessed
to crimes he had not committed after extensive torture.
Iranian
state media broadcast a video on Thursday that they said showed that Akbari
played a role in the 2020 assassination of Iran’s top nuclear scientist, Mohsen
Fakhrizadeh, killed in a 2020 attack outside Tehran that authorities blamed at
the time on Israel.
In the
video, Akbari did not confess to involvement in the assassination but said a
British agent had asked for information about Fakhrizadeh.
Iran’s
state media often airs purported confessions by suspects in politically charged
cases.
Akbari, a
former Iranian deputy defence minister who had lived in the UK for more than a
decade, was arrested more than three years ago, but his family and the Foreign
Office decided against publicising his case hoping he would be released as part
of an internal appeal process.
Akbari’s
wife, Maryam Akbari, told the Guardian last week that her husband was the
victim of Iranian factional power politics and is a patriot.
He had been
deputy defence minister under the reformist Mohammad Khatami, the president of
Iran from 1997 to 2005. He was close to Ali Shamkhani, the secretary of the
supreme national security council, and had been an advocate for the Iran
nuclear deal that was eventually signed in 2015 between the west and Tehran.
Ties
between London and Tehran have deteriorated in recent months as efforts have
stalled to revive the 2015 nuclear pact, to which Britain is a party.
Britain has
also been critical of the Islamic Republic’s violent crackdown on
anti-government protests, sparked by the death in custody of a young
Iranian-Kurdish woman in September.
Reuters contributed to this report
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