Iran executes nuclear scientist for spying for the US

But soon, another clip by him contradicted that and then he appeared at the Pakistani Embassy. He disappeared in 2009 during a pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia and later surfaced in the United States.

A US official said in 2010 that the USA received “useful information” from Amiri.

“Amiri had access to confidential military secrets and was connected to our No. 1 enemy, the Great Satan”, Iranian deputy chief justice Gholam-Hossein Mohseni Ejei said in a statement to the Iranian Student News Agency.

However, it was soon clear that Iranian authorities had not accepted this version of events and Amiri dropped out of public view.

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.

Ejeie said the United States had been “outsmarted” by Iran’s intelligence services.

Amiri’s mother told the BBC that his body had been sent to her with rope marks around his neck.

The Associated Press could not immediately reach Amiri’s family. The U.S. actively tried to recruit nuclear scientists to defect. Later, four Iranian nuclear scientists were assassinated between 2010 and 2012, and Iran blamed the slayings on Israel and the West. In the other, he claimed he was in the U.S.to further his education and was free and safe. -Israeli creation, had begun disrupting thousands of centrifuges at a uranium enrichment facility in Iran.

In interviews, Mr Amiri described being kidnapped and held by Saudi and American spies. His wife and son remained behind in Iran.

In the second video, released on YouTube, Amiri said he had made a decision to continue his studies in the US.

The execution is expected to possibly have an outcome on the 2016 USA elections, given that the foggy details of the case began to unfold during Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s period as Secretary of State.

In July 2010, just before he returned to Iran, Amiri was mentioned in emails to then Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, which surfaced previous year during an investigation into her email server.

Iranian officials welcomed him back to Iran but there has been little information released since. In a video aired by Iranian state TV in 2010, Amiri said he had fled from USA agents.

“Shahram Amiri was hanged for revealing the country’s top secrets to the US”, Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejeie said.

“I was under the harshest mental and physical torture”, he said.

The release of Clinton’s emails a year ago by the State Department appeared to have been damning for Amiri. Her Republican opponent, Donald Trump, has recently released an ad poking Clinton for several of her recent “malfunctions” when speaking – playing off the idea that she is “short-circuiting” enough to make her a risky liability for the country. About a year after he returned to Iran, he was arrested and imprisoned for treason.