‘He did not repent’: Tehran confirms Iranian nuclear scientist who spied for US has been executed
Iranian authorities did not accept Shahram Amiri’s version of events, although his arrest was never officially reported
Iran has executed a nuclear scientist convicted of handing over “confidential and vital” information to the US, a judicial spokesman said on Sunday.
“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 US. 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.
This person ... had established a connection to our number one enemy, America, and had provided the enemy with Iran’s confidential and vital information
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.