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Around the World

UK court finds two Iranian men guilty of spying on London-based journalists for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard

What happened
A London court has found two Iranian men guilty of carrying out surveillance on journalists at the broadcaster Iran International to assist Iran’s intelligence service.
Why it matters
Police say it is the fourth recent case of direct threats to Iranian journalists in the UK, and that Iran increasingly works through hired proxies.
What’s next
Sentencing is scheduled for mid-December, DW reports; a third defendant was acquitted of all charges.

How this story developed

  1. 17:07First report
  2. 18:152nd source
  3. 18:15Confirmed
  4. 18:233rd source
  1. 17:07First reportThe Guardian World
  2. 18:152nd sourceAl Jazeera English
  3. 18:15ConfirmedWas: Single source
  4. 18:23Latest3rd sourceDW World
Full story

The verdict

Two Iranian men were convicted on Thursday at Woolwich Crown Court in south London of engaging in conduct likely to assist Iran’s intelligence service. The verdicts against Mostafa Sepahvand, 41, and Farhad Javadi Manesh, 46, followed a six-week trial, Al Jazeera reported.

According to DW, one of the two was also convicted of planning a violent attack, while the other, who had faced the same charge, was convicted only of the surveillance. A third defendant, a 57-year-old Iranian man, was acquitted of all charges. Sentencing is scheduled for mid-December.

DW reported that one of the convicted men said he had acted under duress after his family was threatened, and that the other said he did not know his actions were helping Iranian intelligence. Iran has repeatedly rejected the allegations.

Who was targeted

The court heard that between August 2024 and March last year the men visited addresses linked to their targets, took photos and videos and researched them online, including with ChatGPT. The targets included two journalists at the London-based Persian-language broadcaster Iran International, Mojtaba Pourmohsen and Kambiz Hosseini, and Jonathan Turner, a founding member of UK Lawyers for Israel.

The Guardian reported that Sepahvand used ChatGPT to find Pourmohsen’s home address and hoped to be paid £150,000 to carry out a violent attack on him. He exchanged WhatsApp messages with a handler, a Revolutionary Guard commander known as Amin, while watching the journalist in December 2024. Hosseini, a satirist, eventually had to leave his home because of the threats.

According to the Guardian, both men had entered the UK illegally between 2016 and 2022, and were recruited through social media.

A wider pattern

Frank Ferguson of the Crown Prosecution Service called it a calculated operation to spy on critics of the Iranian government. London’s Metropolitan Police said it was the fourth case in recent years involving direct threats to Iranian journalists in the UK.

Vicki Evans, a deputy assistant commissioner at the Met, said the threat from hostile states was increasing and that Iran keeps adapting its use of “proxies”, people hired to act for it who often know little about whom they are targeting.

The UK outlawed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in July under new state-threat powers; supporting or assisting it can now bring up to 14 years in prison.