Alireza Akbari, an Iranian politician and once a senior officer in Iran’s notorious IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps), was deputy Minister of Defense from 1998 to 2003. In 2009 he was arrested, accused of spying for Britain, but was released on bail. He moved to Europe and settled in England where, according to his brother Mehdi, he obtained British nationality in recognition of his substantial investments and job creation in the UK. He thus became a British-Iranian dual national – a status recognized in the UK but not in Iran.
Travelling back to Iran in
2019, he was arrested on a charge of spying for Britain’s intelligence
agency, MI6.
On January 11, 2023, BBC
Persian broadcast an audio message in which Akbari said he had been tortured
and forced to confess on camera to crimes he did not commit. The next day Iran’s
intelligence ministry posted a video of him confessing to the spying charge,
and described him as "one of the most important agents of the British
intelligence service in Iran", and.
On January 14, the Iranian judiciary announced that Akbari had
been executed by hanging.
Iran’s decision to go
ahead with Akbari’s execution was no doubt accelerated by two factors: the upcoming 44th anniversary of the Iranian
revolution on February 11, and growing signs that the UK was preparing to proscribe
the IRGC as a terrorist organization.
The BBC reported as early as January 1 that government sources had confirmed
the UK’s intention to do so.
On January 11 the UK’s Middle East minister, Lord Tariq Ahmad, chanced to be in Jerusalem meeting Israel’s foreign minister Eli Cohen.
The very next day,
January 12, British parliamentarians voted unanimously in favour of a motion urging
the UK government to proscribe Iran's IRGC.
During the debate MP Bob Blackman said that the UK should “refer the
regime’s appalling dossier of systematic violations of human rights and crimes
against humanity to the UN Security Council.”
The IRGC should be
proscribed “in its entirety,” Blackman added, echoing the words of then
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who announced the US listing of the IRGC as a “foreign
terrorist organization” back in 2019.
Given the UK’s clear
intention to act against the IRGC, the organization has stepped up its
anti-British activities. Its illogical response
to the mass anti-government protests in the fall over the death of Mahsa Amini
for wearing her hijab “improperly” was to arrest seven people with links to the
UK.
On January 17 the UK
House of Commons issued a research paper titled Dual Nationals imprisoned in
Iran. It quotes research published
in 2022 that suggests at least 66 foreign and dual nationals have been imprisoned
by Iran since 2010 – 15 with links to the UK. Those detained, in addition to
the ill-fated Akbari, included the British-Iranians Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe
and Anoosheh Ashoori, who were released in March 2022. Morad Tahbaz, an American-Iranian national who
also holds British citizenship, remains in Iran, as does British-Iranian Mehran
Raoof.
The IRGC was set up over
40 years ago to defend Iran's Islamic revolution, and it has been the
enforcer and exporter of Iran’s revolution ever since. It has become
the world’s top terror organization, and.is now arguably the most powerful
paramilitary organization in the Middle East. Running a multi-billion
dollar business empire across the Iranian state, the IRGC has unlimited
resources with consequently enormous military, political and economic
power. It uses its vast funds to support extremist governments and
militant groups across the region. These include its satellites
– Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The former is a Shia
organization in thrall to Iran’s Supreme Leader, but the latter is an off-shoot
of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood. To this
Iran has turned a blind eye. Overriding all other considerations is that both
are dedicated to overthrowing Israel, a prime objective of the Iranian
revolution.
Of even greater concern to
the UK is that Iran has supported Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine by
supplying President Vladimir Putin with hundreds of suicide drones and now,
reportedly, with ballistic missiles. The IRGC is also a key player in Iran’s efforts
to develop a nuclear capability.
Alongside this, evidence is mounting about the extent of IRGC
involvement in the international drugs trade.
Over the past few months
the UK has subjected the Iranian regime in general, and the IRGC in particular,
to an escalating set of sanctions, but the delay in designating the Guard Corps
a terrorist organization is becoming increasingly indefensible. UK security
services have done an outstanding job in preventing an IRGC-backed attack in
the UK but, as the accepted rubric goes, the group needs to be lucky only once.
The former British ambassador to Tehran, Richard Dalton, has suggested Akbari’s
execution may be a warning to the UK not to go ahead with plans to
proscribe the IRGC.
Meanwhile it seems that
hardliners are intent on a confrontation with Britain over the issue. Hossein
Shariatmadari, the editor of the Kayan, the newspaper closest to the IRCG,
urged the government to exact revenge on Britain by revealing the true names of
the British intelligence agents who supposedly worked with Alireza Akbari. Shariatmadari wrote: “it would be a terrible
blow to the body of the British spy system and its foreign intelligence and
espionage department, MI6”.
Britain and the Iranian regime, as represented by its foremost protagonist the IRGC, now stand eyeball to eyeball.
Published in the Jerusalem Post 23 February 2023, and in the Jerusalem Post online under the title: "The lead up to IRGC's murder of British-Iranian Alireza Akbari":https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-732437
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