Daily Times

TEHRAN: Iran executed a nuclear scientist convicted of handing over “confidential and vital” information to the United States, a judicial spokesman said on Sunday.

“Shahram Amiri was hanged for revealing the country’s top secrets to the US,” Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejeie said. Amiri disappeared in Saudi Arabia back in June 2009 and resurfaced a year later in the United States. Iranian officials welcomed him back to Iran but there has been little information released.

Amiri said that he had been captured at gunpoint by two Farsi-speaking CIA agents in the Saudi city of Medina and was kept in the US for more than a year.

Ejeie said the US had been “outsmarted” by Iran’s intelligence services. “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.”

“Shahram Amiri, having access to highly confidential information of the regime, had been in contact with our number one enemy, America, and had provided them with confidential and vital information,” Ejeie said. “Amiri was tried in accordance with law and in the presence of his lawyer. He appealed his death sentence based on judicial process.”

The spokesman dismissed a “rumour” by Amiri’s family that he had received a 10-year prison term. Iran signed a landmark deal with world powers last year to place curbs on its controversial nuclear programme in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions.