Media in Iran claim that British-Iranian Ali Reza Akbari, a former senior official in the Iranian Ministry of Defense who was sentenced to death last Wednesday, took part in the assassination of senior scientist Mohsen Fakhrizada in 2020
Iran’s official news agency IRNA released a video purporting to show that British-Iranian citizen Ali Reza Akbari took a role in the 2020 assassination of the country’s top nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.
The report yesterday (Thursday) comes a day after Iran sentenced the former deputy defense minister to death on charges of spying for Britain. Britain described the death sentence as politically motivated and called for his immediate release.
The Iranian Ministry of Intelligence said that Akbari is “one of the most important agents of the British intelligence service in Iran, who had access to several very sensitive centers in the country” and “provided full information, knowingly, to the enemy’s spy service.”
He was a close ally of Ali Shamkhani, who is the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council and served as defense minister from 1997 to 2005 when Akbari was his deputy.
The news agency of the Court of Iran reported that he received the death penalty for “corruption on the face of the earth and harming the internal and external security of the country by passing on intelligence information.”
A video released by IRNA claimed that Akbari was involved in the assassination of prominent Iranian military scientist Mohsen Fahrizada, who was killed in a 2020 attack outside Tehran using a satellite-controlled machine gun. Fakhrizadeh is seen by Western intelligence as the head of Iran’s covert efforts to develop nuclear weapons, a claim Tehran has denied. Iranian officials said Fakhrizadeh was deputy defense minister at the time of the assassination and was working on “nuclear and missile defense.”