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Iran Executes Nuclear Scientist for Giving “Vital Information to the Enemy”

by TheTower.org Staff |

An Iranian nuclear scientist who defected to the United States in 2009 only to return to his country the next year has been executed in Iran for giving “vital information to the enemy,” the Iranian judiciary announced Sunday.

Shahram Amiri had been sentenced to death by an lower court before his execution was carried out, judiciary spokesman Gholam Hossein Mohseni-Ejehi told Iran’s official Islamic Republic News Agency. “By establishing contact with the U.S., Amiri gave the country’s vital information to the enemy,” Mohseni-Ejehi said. The announcement did not explain the nature of the information Amiri had been charged with revealing.

Amiri’s mother, who received his body, said that there were rope marks on his neck, suggesting that he had been hanged.

Amiri had disappeared in 2009 while on pilgrimage to Mecca. Around a year later, he started appearing on Iranian television and YouTube videos claiming that he had been kidnapped by the United States and Saudi Arabia. He claimed that the United States had offered him a large sum of money to reveal details of Iran’s nuclear program.

U.S. officials acknowledged in 2010 that it offered Amiri $5 million and asylum if exchange for information about Iran’s nuclear program. The U.S. government warned Amiri that he could be executed if he returned to Iran.

Iran claimed in July 2010 that Amiri was being held against his will, but then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that Amiri was free to go if he chose to. Later that month, Amiri stayed at the Iranian affairs section of the Pakistani embassy in Washington before returning to Iran; an Iranian source told the Journal that Amiri only returned after his family was threatened. Upon his arrival in Iran, the government claimed that Amiri had actually been spying on the United States. For his part, Amiri said that he was a low-level researcher without access to significant information about Iran’s nuclear program, but U.S. officials said that he had been cooperative and had provided sensitive information about Iran’s nuclear program.

The nuclear scientist’s execution raises questions as to whether Iran’s nuclear program is truly civilian-only and for peaceful purposes, as the Iranian government has long contended.

[Photo: Cloud News / YouTube ]

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