Germany: Pakistani sentenced to prison over spying for Iran

A German court convicted on Monday a Pakistani man of an alleged espionage case in favour of Iran, the New York-based Associated Press has reported.

The defendant, 31-year-old Mustufa Haidar Syed-Naqfi, was sentenced to four years and three months in jail “for working for a foreign intelligence service”, a spokesperson for Berlin’s superior court said.

The court explained that Naqfi spied against Germany and another NATO member”, France, for the Quds Force, the foreign operations wing of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRCG).

The German news agency Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa) reported today that Naqfi was convicted of allegedly collecting extensive material on the former head of the German-Israeli Association and on a French-Israeli professor from an economic university in Paris, for the Quds Force unit of IRGC. The agency stressed that there were no attacks carried out.

The Karachi-born Syed-Naqfi came to Germany in 2012 to study engineering at the University of Bremen. He travelled to Iran at least twice, in October 2015 and February 2016, and received at least €2,052 ($2,237) for his intelligence activities, which included shooting hundreds of photos and creating presentations on the potential targets.

In July 2016, Mustafa was arrested but declined to testify during his trial — “out of fear”, according to his lawyer.