The first sextape was posted online on August 4. The four-minute video, which was clearly filmed with a hidden camera, shows Ali Mohammad Ahmadi -- the former governor of Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad, a province in southwestern Iran -- having sexual relations with a woman.

FRANCE 24 blurred this screengrab from the four-minute video that shows politician Ali Mohammad Ahmadi caught in the act.

Local media outlets, said to have close ties to Ahmadi, alleged that the politician had been set up by a foreign intelligence agency who tried to force him to travel to Canada and take part in a television program critical of the Iranian government.

These same media outlets claimed that Ahmadi refused and that the video was leaked as a result. A close associate of Ahmadi’s swore that the woman in the video was his “legitimate wife under Islamic law”. In reality, however, Ahmadi has been married to the same woman for years… and she is definitely not the woman who appears in the sextape.

On August 6, a second video of Ahmadi with the same woman was posted online. In the eight-minute video, the pair spend most of the time talking and kissing.

Shortly afterwards, Iranian social media users finally identified the mysterious woman, who works for an Iranian airline.

Ahmadi has been described as a centrist and a reformist and has close ties to the government of President Hassan Rouhani. Ahmadi recently resigned from his position as governor to start campaigning for the February 2020 legislative elections.



Second politician gets caught in the act

On August 9, another leaked sextape popped up on social media, this time featuring a different Iranian politician -- Abbas Malekzadeh, the mayor of Sadra, a town of about 100,000 residents in the southern province of Fars.

A few days earlier, on August 5, he had been arrested with three people from the city council, all accused of corruption.



Unlike the videos of Ahmadi, which looked like they were filmed with a hidden camera, Malekzadeh filmed this video himself. In the video, he stands there naked, caressing the naked woman with him as she talks on the telephone.

In the days following the leak, the woman in the video posted two videos begging social media users to erase the sextape. She says it was filmed three years ago and could “ruin [her] life” as she is now married.





This screengrab was taken of the sextape featuring Malekzadeh. It was blurred by France 24.

Other photos of Malekzadeh have recently appeared online. In these images, he is seen smoking hookah with a woman named Zahra Jamali, one of his assistants at the city council, whowas arrested with Malekzadeh on August 5. In one of the photos, Jamali seems to be touching his cheek, a gesture between a man and a woman that's forbidden by Islamic law, unless they are related.

