Iran, locked in a worsening political standoff with Western powers, has handed down death sentences to several nationals accused of being part of a CIA-trained spy network uncovered earlier this year, an official said yesterday.
Seventeen people were arrested, a senior intelligence official told foreign media in Tehran.
None of the suspects are dual nationals, said the official, who declined to be identified and did not say how many were sentenced to death.
Photo: AP
The announcement marks a show of force by Tehran at a time of turbulent ties with Washington after US President Donald Trump’s administration withdrew from an 2015 nuclear accord with the Islamic republic and reimposed crippling sanctions on its economy.
The friction was made worse by a diplomatic crisis between Iran and the UK, which seized an Iranian oil tanker in Gibraltar earlier this month, saying it carried oil bound for Syria in violation of UN sanctions.
Iran responded on Friday by holding a British tanker near the Strait of Hormuz, a shipping chokepoint through which about 40 percent of the world’s seaborne oil travels.
Asked about Iran’s arrest of spies on Fox News, US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo said that Tehran “has a long history of lying.”
Its announcement about the arrests is “further evidence of the outlaw nature of the Iranian regime,” Pompeo added.
Iran has also accused Trump and his administration of lying about its operations related to Tehran, including over US statements that it shot down an Iranian drone last week.
The Iranian Ministry of Intelligence has detected an uptick in US efforts to recruit spies in Iran since the election of Trump in 2016 and the appointment of Gina Haspel as CIA director, the Iranian official said.
Iranian officials have identified the CIA agents who had recruited the suspects as diplomats based in Turkey, Zimbabwe and Finland.
A program aired by state television yesterday showed clips of Trump and White House National Security Adviser John Bolton with Hormuz as the backdrop.
The show identified the alleged members of the cell and contained what the network said were confessions by the accused, whose faces were blurred and voices distorted.
The alleged spies were trained by the CIA to gather classified information from sensitive locations in Iran, including military bases, nuclear facilities and economic centers, the official said.
The US spy agency lured recruits by promising residency and jobs in the US and safe passage out of Iran, setting up shell companies as a cover to approach and hire Iranians, he added.
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