Iran executes man accused of helping Israel kill colonel in Revolutionary Guards

The Guardian

30-04-2025

Iran has executed a 36-year-old man it accused of helping the Mossad, Israel's foreign intelligence agency, kill a senior officer in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) in Tehran in 2022.
Iranian state media said Mohsen Langarneshin was hanged, the usual method of execution in Iran, at Ghezel Hesar prison early on Wednesday morning.
Langarneshin's family and human rights groups insisted the former IT consultant was innocent of the charges against him and that any reported confessions were obtained by torture or blackmail.
On Tuesday, Langarneshin's mother made an emotional appeal for his life to be spared. 'Please pray for my child … I do not know if he will see the sunrise tomorrow or not,' she said in a post on social media.
'I don't know why the court refuses to accept any of the documents and evidence we bring. We have so many pieces of evidence that prove his innocence, but nothing is accepted.'
According to Iran's state news agency IRNA, Langarneshin was a 'senior spy' for the Mossad who provided critical 'technical support' for the assassination of Hassan Sayyad Khodaei, a colonel in the Revolutionary Guards who was shot five times by gunmen on a motorbike outside his home in Tehran, as well as for other alleged operations.
The IRNA report said the Mossad recruited Langarneshin in 2020 and that he met with Israeli intelligence officers in Georgia and Nepal. He was arrested in July 2023.
Activists fear that Iran scapegoats innocent people after failing to catch the actual agents who have often escaped overseas by the time investigators identify them.
'Mohsen Langarneshin, who was sentenced to death in an unfair judicial process based on confessions obtained under torture and charged with espionage for Israel, was hanged at dawn today,' said Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, the director of the Norway-based Iran Human Rights (IHR) monitor.
'The Iranian authorities' execution machine is accelerating every day, taking the lives of more people,' he said, describing the executions as 'extrajudicial killings'.
At least 335 people have been hanged in Iran so far this year alone, campaigners say. Iran executed more than 900 people in 2025. A man was executed in December 2023 after he was found guilty of collaborating with the Mossad. Four others were hanged a year earlier over alleged ties to Israel.
The US-based Abdorrahman Boroumand Center, which had campaigned over his case, said Langarneshin had been convicted at a revolutionary court presided over by judge Abolghasem Salavati, sanctioned by the US and EU and notorious for his handing out of death sentences.
'He denied all charges, stating that his confessions were extracted under torture,' the group said.
The revolutionary courts were set up after the 1979 revolution and deliver often summary justice in closed hearings.
Israel and Iran have been engaged in a shadow war of assassinations and bombings for decades. A series of attacks attributed to the Mossad has targeted Iranian scientists, experts and academics, many connected to Iran's nuclear programme. Last year, Israel is thought to have killed Ismail Haniyeh, the most senior political leader of Hamas, with a bomb in a bedroom of a government guesthouse in Tehran
In Israel, a 72-year-old man was sentenced on Tuesday to 10 years in prison accused of discussing plots with Iranian intelligence services to assassinate senior government officials, including the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
The hanging comes as the US president, Donald Trump, seeks to strike a new deal with the Iranian leadership on its nuclear programme, with both Israel and its ally the US long refusing to rule out a military strike on Iran.
The Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said on Wednesday that Iran expected the next round of negotiations with the US to be held in Rome on Saturday, adding that Iran also anticipated having a meeting on Friday with France, Germany and the UK to discuss the talks.