By Parisa Hafezi
DUBAI, June 9 (Reuters) – An Iranian man who provided information to U.S. and Israeli intelligence services on the whereabouts of Iran‘s slain Revolutionary Guards commander Qassem Soleimani has been sentenced to death, Iran‘s judiciary said on Tuesday.
On Jan. 3, a U.S. drone strike in Iraq killed Soleimani, leader of the Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force. Washington blamed Soleimani for masterminding attacks by Iran-aligned militias on U.S. forces in the region.
“Mahmoud Mousavi-Majd, one of the spies for the CIA and the Mossad, has been sentenced to death … He gave information about the whereabouts of martyr Soleimani to our enemies,” judiciary spokesman Gholamhossein Esmaili said in a televised news conference.
“He passed on security information to the Israeli and American intelligence agencies about Iran‘s armed forces, particularly the Guards,” Esmaili said. However, he did not say whether the information offered by Mousavi-Majd was linked to Soleimani’s killing in Iraq.
“He was sentenced to death by a revolutionary court and a supreme court has upheld his death sentence. He will be executed soon.”
Officials have not said whether Mousavi-Majd’s case is linked to Iran‘s announcement in February that a man had been sentenced to death in Islamic Republic for spying for the CIA and attempting to pass on information about Tehran’s nuclear program.
Soleimani’s killing led to a peak in confrontation between Iran and the United States. Iran retaliated with a rocket attack on an Iraqi air base where U.S. forces were stationed. Hours later, Iranian forces on high alert mistakenly shot down a Ukrainian passenger airliner taking off from Tehran.
(Writing by Parisa Hafezi Editing by Peter Graff and William Maclean)
