One man sentenced to death and others receive long sentences in further blow to efforts to calm US-Iranian tensions

This article is more than 11 months old

This article is more than 11 months old

Iranian courts have sentenced one man to death for spying for the US and jailed two others for 10 years for the same crime, as well as imprisoning a fourth person for six years for spying for Britain, an Iranian judiciary spokesman has said.

“One person has been sentenced to death for spying for America … but the ruling has been appealed,” Gholamhossein Esmaili told the judiciary’s news website, Mizan, on Tuesday.

He also told the official Iranian TV channel: “A spy working for the Iranian defence ministry was sentenced to death on a charge of spying for the United States.”

The man sentenced to death was not identified. Iranian agencies said Ali Nafriyeh and Mohammad Ali Babapour had been sentenced for spying on behalf of the US, while Mohammad Ali Nasab was sentenced for spying for Britain.

The development marks another blow to European efforts to calm tensions between Iran and the US, which is pursuing a policy of maximum economic pressure against Tehran.

The UK claims that sentences handed down to numerous British Iranian dual nationals, including Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, amount to a form of state hostage-taking. She has been held on spying charges since 2016.

The UK held a behind-closed-doors session on the sidelines of the UN general assembly in New York last week to highlight the state of human rights in Iran.

Discussions have been under way in private between the US and Iran about a prisoner swap, including at the UN last week.

In New York, the US offered to allow the Iranian foreign minister, Javad Zarif, access to the ailing Iranian ambassador to the UN, Majid Takht-Ravanchi, but only if an American in an Iranian jail was released. Zarif’s movements at the UN had been restricted by the US as a condition for granting him a visa to attend the general assembly.

Brian Hook, the state department’s special representative for Iran, said that if Iran wanted to show good faith, it should release the US citizens it has detained, including Xiyue Wang, a Princeton University graduate student who was arrested in Iran in 2016.

At a news conference in New York last Thursday, the Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, said Tehran was open to talking about prisoner swaps but that the ball was in Washington’s court after Iran’s release of a Lebanese man with US permanent residency in June.

A British-Iranian anthropologist, Kameel Ahmady, was arrested in August and also taken to Evin prison, where Zaghari-Ratcliffe is being held. Charges against him have not yet been made public.

There has been British concern about Ahmady. The academic is an Iranian Kurd who was born in the western city of Mahabad and granted British citizenship in 1994 but has been living in Iran for the last 14 years.

A court has separately sentenced Rouhani’s brother to five years in prison, Esmaili told the semi-official Fars news agency.

In May, Hossein Fereydoun was sentenced to an unspecified jail term in a corruption case that the president’s supporters allege was politically motivated.

Esmaili said on Tuesday that Fereydoun was jailed for five years but may face further charges in another case, but did not give further details, Fars reported.