General Qasem Soleimani was killed in an American drone strike (File)
Tehran:
Iran executed a former translator convicted of spying for the United States and Israel on Monday, including for helping to locate a senior Iranian general later killed by the Americans, the judiciary said.
The murder of Major General Qasem Soleimani in a US drone strike near Baghdad airport in January brought Iran and the decades-long enemy of Iran and the United States to the brink of conflict.
The judicial website Mizan Online declared that the death of Mahmoud Mousavi Majd “was executed Monday morning for espionage so that the case of his treason towards his country is definitively closed”.
Spokesman said earlier this month that Majd had been sentenced to death for spying on “various areas of security, in particular the military and the Quds Force, as well as the location and movements of the martyr General Qasem Soleimani “.
Majd was convicted of receiving large sums of money from both the US Central Intelligence Agency and the Mossad of Israel, said spokesman Gholamhossein Esmaili.
Soleimani was head of Quds Force, the foreign operations branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Iran.
Iran retaliated against the United States for his death by firing a flare of ballistic missiles at American troops stationed in Iraq, but President Donald Trump has chosen not to respond militarily.
While the attack on the western Iraqi base of Ain Al-Asad did not kill any American soldiers, dozens suffered a head trauma.
“U.S. dollars”
Majd was arrested about two years ago and was not directly involved in the murder of Soleimani, according to a statement from the judiciary in June.
Majd emigrated to Syria in the 1970s with his family and worked as a translator from English to Arabic in a company, said Mizan.
When the war broke out, he chose to stay in the country while his family left.
“His knowledge of Arabic and his knowledge of the geography of Syria made him close to Iranian military advisers and he took responsibility in groups stationed from Idlib to Latakia,” added the site.
Majd was not a member of the Revolutionary Guards “but has infiltrated many sensitive areas under the guise of a translator.”
He was admitted to have been paid “in US dollars to reveal information about convoys of advisers, military equipment and communications systems, commanders and their movements, important geographic areas, codes and passwords” until it is reviewed and its access is downgraded.
Iranian state television has shown footage of what it says is one of Majd’s CIA managers, claiming that the alarm was triggered after the communications between the two were intercepted.
He also showed Majd in an apparent confessional video saying that he had received coded messages and has met his managers with documents, including “photos and identification documents of the forces and commanders”.
Executions and arrests
According to the report, he had planned to also work with Saudi intelligence before being detained.
He was arrested in October 2018, said Mizan.
Iran said last week that it had executed another man convicted of spying for the CIA by selling information about the Iranian missile program.
Reza Asgari had worked for years in the aerospace division of the Ministry of Defense but retired four years ago, after which he sold the CIA “information he had on our missiles” in exchange for large sums of money.
Iran imposed a similar sentence in February on Amir Rahimpour, another man convicted of spying for the United States and of conspiracy to sell information on the Iranian nuclear program.
Tehran announced in December that it had arrested eight people “linked to the CIA” and involved in nationwide street protests that erupted in the previous month following a surge in oil prices.
He also said in July 2019 that he had dismantled a CIA spy network, arrested 17 suspects between March 2018 and March 2019 and sentenced some of them to death.
At the time, Trump dismissed the complaint as “completely false”.
(With the exception of the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
