Tehran
(AFP) - Iran has executed a nuclear scientist convicted of handing over
"confidential and vital" information to the United States, a judicial
spokesman said.
"Shahram
Amiri was hanged for revealing the country's top secrets to the enemy,"
Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejeie told reporters in Tehran.
Amiri, 39, disappeared in Saudi Arabia in June 2009 and resurfaced a year later in the United States.
Conflicting
accounts said he had either been abducted or had defected at a time
when international tensions over Iran's nuclear programme were at their
peak.
In
a surprise move, Amiri then returned to Tehran in July 2010, saying he
had been kidnapped at gunpoint by two Farsi-speaking CIA agents in the
Saudi city of Medina.
At
first he was greeted as a hero, telling reporters as he stepped off the
plane at Tehran airport that he had resisted pressure from his US
captors to pretend he was a defector.
He
denied he was a nuclear scientist and said US officials wanted him to
tell the media he had "defected on his own and was carrying important
documents and a laptop which contained classified secrets of Iran's
military nuclear programme".
"But with God's will, I resisted," Amiri said as he was welcomed home by his tearful wife and young son.
- US 'outsmarted' -
However,
it was soon clear that Iranian authorities had not accepted this
version of events and Amiri dropped out of public view. His arrest was
never officially reported.
Iran's judicial spokesman said Sunday that its intelligence services had "outsmarted" the US.
"American
intelligence services thought Iran has no knowledge of his transfer to
Saudi Arabia and what he was doing but we knew all of it and were
monitoring," Ejeie told reporters.
"This
person, having access to confidential and highly confidential
information of the regime, had established a connection to our number
one enemy, America, and had provided the enemy with Iran's confidential
and vital information," he added.
The US State Department declined to comment on the case when asked on Sunday.
Tehran
and Washington have had no diplomatic ties since 1980, when students
stormed the US embassy following the previous year's Islamic revolution.
"Shahram
Amiri was tried in accordance with law and in the presence of his
lawyer. He appealed his death sentence based on judicial process. The
Supreme Court... confirmed it after meticulous reviews," Ejeie said.
"We
like all convicts to repent and reform. Not only did he not repent and
compensate for his past, but he tried to send out false information from
inside the prison, and finally he was punished," he added.
- 'Covert headquarters' -
Numerous
media reports in recent years have supported the idea that Amiri was a
defector with highly prized information on Iran's nuclear programme.
"Shahram
Amiri described to American intelligence officers details of how a
university in Tehran became the covert headquarters for the country's
nuclear efforts," the New York Times reported in July 2010, citing
unnamed US officials.
"While
still in Iran, he was also one of the sources for a much-disputed
National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's suspected weapons program,
published in 2007," the report said.
In
a confusing series of events shortly before his repatriation to Tehran,
three separate videos emerged appearing to show Amiri claiming either
that he was abducted by US agents, had come freely to study, or that his
life was in danger and he wanted to return to Iran.
At
the time, world powers had grown increasingly concerned that Iran was
pursuing a nuclear weapon -- a charge that it has consistently denied.
Between
2010 and 2012, four nuclear scientists were assassinated inside Iran
and a fifth survived a bomb attack. The government blamed the attacks on
US and Israeli intelligence services.
Iran
finally reached a deal with world powers in July 2015, promising to
curb its nuclear programme in exchange for a lifting of international
sanctions.
The
deal took effect in January this year but Washington and the European
Union maintain some sanctions on Iran over its human rights record and
ballistic missile testing.
Tehran
has complained that the remaining sanctions are locking it out of the
international banking system and hampering its ability to make major
purchases, such as aircraft.
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