law student and purported adviser to Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was executed in Zahedan prison in southeastern Iran last month for allegedly spying for Israel, London-based opposition news network Iran International reported on Monday.
Read more:
According to the report, Mohsen Saravani, 24, also an advisor to former Sistan and Baluchestan Governor Ali Osat Hashemi, was implicated by Tehran in gathering classified information via government agents and relaying it to a Mossad agent.
The Revolutionary Guards Corps intelligence arrested Saravani following a complaint from the governor's office accusing him of stealing sensitive information, but he was acquitted and released after 45 days.
He was arrested again in June last year and told a court that his confession to espionage was made under torture. Additionally, it was reported that three alleged Mossad agents were arrested, suspected of plotting to assassinate nuclear scientists.
Since 2018, when he was 18, Saravani frequently visited the government offices in Zahedan, the capital of Sistan and Baluchestan Province in southeastern Iran, as a young adviser to regional governor Ali Abtaz Hashemi.
He forged close ties with Danial Mohebi, the next governor of Sistan and Baluchestan, and Ali Asghar Mirshkar, a security and law enforcement officer in the region. Local websites published photos of Saravani with these officials.
Presenting himself as an envoy of Mohammad Mariah, Zahedan's public prosecutor, and being photographed with Vahid Haqqanian, a special advisor to Khamenei, Saravani gained access to the country’s leadership.
Saravani met with Lamandana Zangeneh Soroush, the former CEO of a local investment firm, and introduced himself as the young advisor to the Iranian leadership.
"When I became the CEO of the provincial investment office in 2016 or 2017, Mohsen Saravani approached my office several times requesting a meeting to see me,” Soroush said about Saravani’s court appeal verdict, according to Iran International.
“Due to a heavy workload, he only managed to see me four or five times. He told my office managers to inform me that 'the young adviser to Khamenei's leadership team is requesting a meeting.' Fearing that the leadership would be offended, I granted him time for a meeting."
According to Soroush, Saravani showed her an official letter. "In our meeting, he presented a letter purportedly from the young adviser to the governor of Sistan and Baluchestan Province. The letter bore the seal of the governor's office. I told him I wanted to see the original letter from the governor. He said the original was in Tehran and that he would bring it when he could," she said.
According to Soroush, the Guards Corps intelligence was convinced that Saravani was indeed serving as a young adviser to Khamenei's office, based on a document seen by Iran International.
However, presumably following an extensive investigation, he was later accused of collaborating with Mossad. Soroush was also charged with providing Saravani with approximately a thousand confidential documents and permitting him to copy three of them.
The appeals court reduced her sentence from eight years to one-year probation after she proved that she was unaware the young man was allegedly impersonating an official from Khamenei's office. The third defendant in the espionage case, 26-year-old teacher and economist Afshin Gorbani Mashani, remains of unknown status.