Iranian police have arrested the alleged leader and four other members of a spy network they suspect are affiliated with the Israeli Mossad, Iranian law enforcement authorities said on Thursday.
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The Iranian authorities did not give the nationality of those arrested but said they had received training for armed operations and sabotage.
"The arrested five members of this spy network were given various pledges from [Israel's] Mossad, including financial promises, to gather information from important areas across the country," the law enforcement intelligence organization said in a statement reported by the semi-official ILNA news agency.
Iran and Israel are longtime foes and are currently locked in a dispute over Iran's nuclear program and Iran's efforts to establish a military presence on its borders through various terrorist proxies.
On Wednesday, Iran's minister of intelligence, Esmail Khatib said Tehran had foiled subversive actions from the "Zionist regime" – its term for Israel. Iranian security forces have successfully carried out a number of operations against Israel over the last few months, he said without providing specifics.
Last week, Iran's security forces said they arrested a network of agents working for Israel who entered Iran from Iraq's Kurdistan region to carry out sabotage and what they called planned sabotage actions and "unprecedented terrorist operations" in several "sensitive areas" – a likely reference to military and security installations.
Last month, the state-run IRNA news agency quoted the prosecutor of Iran's southeastern Sistan and Baluchistan province as alleging that three people arrested in April there on suspicion of working with Israel's Mossad intelligence agency had wanted to kill Iranian nuclear scientists.
In May, an unexplained incident struck the Parchin military complex, a major military and weapons development base east of Tehran, killing an engineer and injuring another employee. Iran's powerful Revolutionary Guard later said the incident was a case of "industrial sabotage."
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