Iran to execute spy convicted of helping US kill top Iranian general Qassem Soleimani

An Iranian national convicted of spying for the US and Israel by helping target top Iranian general Qassem Soleimani will be executed soon, Iran’s judiciary said on Tuesday.

Mahmoud Mousavi Majd was convicted of spying on Iran’s armed forces “especially the Quds Force and on the whereabouts and movements of martyr General Qassem Soleimani” for large sums of money from both Israel’s Mossad and the CIA, judiciary spokesman Gholamhossein Esmaili told a televised news conference.

His sentence was upheld by Iran’s supreme court and would be “carried out soon,” the spokesman added.

Soleimani headed the Quds Force, the foreign operations arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, and was killed in January in a US drone strike near Baghdad airport.

The strike also killed Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, deputy commander of Iran-backed militias in Iraq known as the Popular Mobilisation Forces, and five others, including the militias’ airport protocol officer, Mohammed Reda. 

Iran later retaliated for Soleimani’s killing with a ballistic missile strike targeting US forces in Iraq. That same night, the Guard accidentally shot down a Ukrainian jetliner in Tehran, killing 176 people.