A judge in Iran has sentenced a US-Iranian man to death for spying for the CIA, officials and media said on Monday, exacerbating Tehran-Washington tensions already high in the face of Western sanctions on the Islamic republic’s nuclear programme. Amir Mirzai Hekmati, a 28-year-old former Marine born in the United States to an Iranian family, was “sentenced to death for cooperating with a hostile nation, membership of the CIA and trying to implicate Iran in terrorism,” the judge in Tehran ruled, the Fars and ISNA news agencies reported. Hekmati has 20 days to appeal, ISNA quoted chief prosecutor Gholam Hossein Mohseni Ejei as saying, without specifying when the sentence was handed down.
The accused was shown on state television in mid-December saying in fluent Farsi and English that he was a Central Intelligence Agency operative sent to infiltrate Iran’s intelligence ministry. He had been arrested months earlier. Iranian officials said his cover was blown by agents for Iran who spotted him at the US-run Bagram military air base in neighbouring Afghanistan. But Hekmati’s family in the United States told US media he had travelled to Iran to visit his grandmothers and insisted he was not a spy.
