The Associated Press quoted Iranian judiciary spokesman Gholamhosein Mohseni Ejehi as saying that Shahram Amiri “had access to the country’s secret and classified information” and “had been linked to our hostile and No. 1 enemy, America, the Great Satan”.
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Conflicting accounts said he had either been abducted or had defected at a time when global tensions over Iran’s nuclear program were at their peak.
Iran had accused the Central Intelligence Agency of kidnapping Amiri.
At first he was greeted as a hero, telling reporters as he stepped off the plane at Tehran airport that he had resisted pressure from his United States captors to pretend he was a defector.
The U.S. said in 2010 that Amiri had defected voluntarily and was paid millions of dollars for providing “useful information”. His wife and son remained behind in Iran.
Iran confirmed on Sunday that Amiri had been hanged for treason.
Iranian officials have said the nuclear program is for peaceful research and power generation, and was never meant to produce a warhead.
FBI Director James Comey said last month that the FBI had found evidence that “the security culture of the State Department in general, and with respect to use of unclassified systems in particular, was generally lacking in the kind of care for classified information that’s found elsewhere in the USA government”.
“That goes to show just how reckless and careless her decision was to put that kind of highly classified information on a private server and I think her judgment is not suited to keep this country safe”, he added.
The US State Department declined to comment on the case when asked on Sunday.
Tehran and Washington have had no diplomatic ties since 1980, when students stormed the USA embassy following the previous year’s Islamic revolution.
“Shram Amiri was tried in accordance with law and in the presence of his lawyer”. He appealed his death sentence based on judicial process.
“We like all convicts to repent and reform”.
The official IRNA news agency quoted a spokesman for Iran’s judiciary, Gholamhosein Mohseni Ejehi, confirming the execution of Shahram Amiri, an Iranian nuclear scientist caught up in a real-life U.S. spy mystery who later returned to his home country and disappeared. U.S. officials said Amiri had been free to come and go as he pleased, and that he may have returned because of pressures on his family in Iran. In the third video, broadcast again by Iranian state TV, Amiri claimed to be on the run from the Central Intelligence Agency.
Shahram Amiri was a nuclear scientist who worked on Iran’s nuclear project.
The family of Shahram Amiri, an expert in radioactive isotopes at Tehran’s Malek Ashtar University, which is affiliated to Iran’s ministry of defence, told two overseas Persian-language TV networks at the weekend that he had been executed earlier in the week at an unknown location.
“Amiri said on his return to Tehran in July 2010”.
The convoluted ordeal that ended with Mr. Amiri’s execution took place during a period of heightened concern in the USA and other Western countries that Iran was expanding its nuclear program and seeking to develop a nuclear weapon.
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Another email, sent by Sullivan on July 12, 2010, appears to obliquely refer to the scientist just hours before his appearance at the Pakistani Embassy became widely known. The government blamed the attacks on USA and Israeli intelligence services.
