Iran executes nuclear scientist accused of spying for US

Iran yesterday announced it had executed nuclear scientist Shahram Amiri on charges of leaking “top secret information” to the United States.

“Shahram Amiri was hanged for revealing the country’s top secrets to the enemy [US],” judiciary spokesman Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei said.

“Amiri had access to confidential military secrets and was connected to our number-one enemy, the Great Satan,” Mohseni-Ejei said.

“The CIA thought that its movements were kept away from the eyes of the Iranian Intelligence Ministry. They took Amiri to Saudi Arabia.”

Amiri, 38, disappeared in suspicious circumstances while on pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia in 2009.

He re-appeared a year later in Iranian interests section of the Pakistani Embassy in Washington demanding he be sent home. He claimed in a video that he had been abducted, interrogated, tortured and offered millions of dollars in bribes to reveal his country’s secrets. He said he rejected the US effort to break him.

At the time, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said he handed himself into the United States and could leave whenever he wanted.

He received a hero’s welcome from family members and Iranian officials upon returning to Iran, but was arrested less than a year later.