Iran has executed a former employee of the defense ministry who was convicted of spying on behalf of the Central Intelligence Agency, the country's judiciary said Tuesday. It was the second such execution in the past month.
The report said Reza Asgari was executed last week. Judiciary spokesman Gholamhossein Esmaili said Asgari had worked in the airspace department of the ministry and retired in 2016.
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"In the last years of his service, he joined the CIA, he sold information about our missiles ... to the CIA and took money from them," Esmaili said. "He was identified, tried, and sentenced to death."
Separately, Esmaili said a death sentence for Mahmoud Mousavi-Majd, an Iranian accused of spying for US and Israeli intelligence, is among those still to be carried out.
Last month, the judiciary said Mousavi-Majd, who was arrested in 2018, had spied on former Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps commander Qassem Soleimani, adding however that the case was not connected to Soleimani's assassination earlier this year.
On Jan. 3, a US drone strike in Iraq killed Soleimani, leader of the IRGC's Quds Force. Washington had accused Soleimani of masterminding attacks by Iran-aligned militias on US forces in the region.
The judiciary also said on Tuesday it had executed two men responsible for a bombing at a military parade in northwestern Iran in 2010, according to the official IRNA news agency.
Twelve people were killed and more than 70 injured in the attack in the city of Mahabad, a predominantly Kurdish area, and officials at the time blamed "anti-revolutionary" militants backed by foreign states.
The judiciary spokesman further said the supreme court had upheld death sentences for three men convicted of carrying out violent acts such as burning buses and banks during anti-government protests last November.
Scores of Twitter users used the Farsi-language hashtag "don't execute" to protest at the sentences for the three men.
In June, Iran said another alleged spy, Jalal Hajizavar, was hanged in a prison near Tehran. The report said Hajizavar – also a former staffer of the defense ministry – had admitted in court that he was paid to spy for the CIA. The report said authorities had also confiscated espionage equipment from his residence. It said the court sentenced Hajizavar's wife to 15 years in prison for her role in the espionage.
Last year, Iran announced it had captured 17 spies it said were working for the CIA.
Before that, in 2016, Iran executed a nuclear scientist convicted of spying for the United States.
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