On Tuesday, the Iranian judiciary announced that alleged CIA and Mossad spy Mahmoud Mousavi-Majd has been sentenced to death for passing information to the US and Israel about the Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force Commander Qassem Soleimani.
Soleimani was killed when a US drone fired missiles at a convoy of Quds Force and Iraninian militias leaving Baghdad International Airport on January 3. Soleimani’s death heightened US-Iran tensions, and a retaliatory airstrike by Iran on March 11 killed two Americans and one British soldier.
Iranian judiciary spokesman Gholamhossein Esmaili told Iranian television the man they believe responsible for passing information to the US about Soleimani’s whereabouts, Mahmoud Mousavi-Majd, “will be executed soon.”
“Mahmoud Mousavi-Majd, one of the spies for the CIA and the Mossad, has been sentenced to death … He had shared information about the whereabouts of martyr Soleimani with our enemies,” Esmaili told the June 9 press conference.
“He passed on security information to the Israeli and American intelligence agencies about Iran’s armed forces, particularly the [Revolutionary] Guards.”
A later statement from the Iranian judiciary clarified that, while Iran believes Mousavi-Majd passed information to its enemies about Soleimani, that information was not used to carry out the so-called “terrorist act of the U.S. government” that killed the commander at Baghdad International Airport in January.
“All the legal proceedings in the case of this spy … had been carried out long before the martyrdom of Soleimani,” the judiciary explained.
Mousavi-Majd was, according to Iran, arrested in October 2018. A revolutionary court originally handed him a death sentence by a revolutionary court, and upon appeal Iran’s supreme court upheld the decision.