The regime in Tehran has finally executed Alireza Akbari, a British-Iranian national accused of conducting espionage activities for the British foreign intelligence agency MI6. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has strongly condemned Akbari’s hanging, which Downing Street had been trying to prevent for more than three years. “I am shocked by the execution in Iran of British-Iranian citizen Alireza Akbari,” Sunak wrote on his official Twitter account. “It is a cruel and cowardly act committed by a barbaric regime that does not respect the human rights of its own citizens. My thoughts today are with Alireza’s family and friends.” The Foreign Secretary, James Cleverly, responded in a tone similar to that of the Prime Minister, but added sharpness by accompanying his words with threats of reprisals. “This barbaric act calls for one Condemnation in the strongest possible terms. It will not go unanswered,” Cleverly warned.
Akbari, who rose to become Iran’s deputy defense minister two decades ago during the government of reformist Mohamed Khatami, was arrested during a visit to his country of origin in 2019 and shortly afterwards convicted of alleged espionage activities. Iran’s national judicial news agency Mizan announced on Saturday that Akbari had been hanged, without giving the exact date of the execution. The current secret service minister, Ismael Khatib, described the convict as “one of the most important agents of British espionage deployed on Iranian territory”.
However, last Wednesday, BBC Persia broadcast an audio recording of Akbari, who his UK-based wife was able to visit in prison. The prisoner, who was placed in solitary confinement in the final days of his life, explains in the recording how he was deceived three years ago while he was already in the UK. A senior Iranian diplomat, he says, invited him to return to the country to discuss any negotiations being held with western powers over its nuclear capacity.
As soon as he entered Iran, he was arrested. They accused him of obtaining top secrets of the Iranian secret service through Ali Samjani, the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, whom the regime says he bribed “with a bottle of perfume and a shirt”. Agency Mizan’s full account ensures Akbari has received multiple payments from the UK security services of €2 million, €300,000 and €56,000 respectively through bank accounts in Austria, Spain and the UK. The regime claims that the convict was trained in the UK in methods to gather information, cover his tracks, set up shell companies that mislead the Iranian authorities or even resist possible interrogations.
In his account, Akbari claims he was tortured and interrogated by Iranian intelligence agents “for more than 3,500 hours.” “Using psychological and physical methods, they managed to break my will, drive me insane and take what they wanted from me (…). At gunpoint and with death threats, they got him to admit false corruption allegations,” he explains. The family and the British government had kept their efforts to get the detainee released very discreetly, encouraged by false hopes of a solution they felt Tehran had not missed. However, the country’s regime does not recognize the dual nationality of its citizens and has never admitted that Akbari was British.
In the BBC Persia audio broadcast, the convict accused the authorities of using his execution “to take revenge on Britain.” Downing Street has in recent months imposed sanctions on certain relevant Iranian figures at the head of the so-called morality police and other security forces, as punishment for Tehran’s violent response to the protests sparked by the death of young woman-old Kurd Mahsa Amini in the September last year. She was arrested for wearing the mandatory hijab (veil) in an “improper” manner and died in police stations.
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Akbari’s wife assured some British media that her husband was “victim of an internal power struggle” within the regime. The current secret services have acted against him to weaken Samjani – who they accuse of having been bought. He was defense minister during the moderate Khatami years, and the two have been close friends ever since. The maneuver allegedly has to do with the intense debate raging in the highest echelons of Iran’s power over the need to return to the path of self-restraint agreed with the international community over Tehran’s deployed nuclear development program.
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