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Politics

Shahram Amiri Is Executed, Taking His Secrets to the Grave

August 6, 2016
Reza HaghighatNejad
5 min read
Shahram Amiri Is Executed, Taking His Secrets to the Grave

Iranian nuclear scientist Shahram Amiri was executed on Wednesday, August 3. 

In 2009, Amiri traveled to the United States after making a religious pilgrimage to Mecca. He later said US intelligence agents had abducted him.

Iranian authorities may have pressured Amiri to return to Iran by threatening his family. He was first given a hero's welcome but was later arrested. 

Iranian nuclear scientist Shahram Amiri was executed on Wednesday, August 3 at an unknown location. He had returned to Iran from the United States on July 15, 2010. Upon his arrival, Foreign Ministry Vice-President for Consular Affairs Hassan Ghashghavi went to welcome him. Numerous Islamic Republic officials praised him as a national hero. He appeared on TV programs in which he described escaping from the clutches of American intelligence agents.

“If you want to know why Shahram Amiri returned to Iran, you must pay attention to the fate of Saeed Emami’s family,” a reliable source in Tehran tells IranWire, referring to the case of the former Iranian deputy intelligence minister said to have committed suicide in prison. “The pressure put on Amiri's family was much higher than the pressure put on Saeed Emami’s family.”

In 1999, Emami was charged with masterminding Iran’s so-called chain murders, a series of killings and kidnappings targeting Iranian intellectuals. Emami was arrested amidst public outrage, but it was soon announced that he had committed suicide. Authorities later released a video in which his wife confessed, apparently under duress, that her husband had been cooperating with Israel.

It now appears that the Islamic Republic employed a similar strategy of pressuring family members to force Shahram Amiri to return to Iran, but there remain few satisfactory answers to the many questions surrounding his life in the past five years.

 

Mysteries and Unknowns

Iranian media have referred to Amiri as a nuclear scientist, but he himself had said that he wanted to study nuclear medicine in the US. Some media outlets reported that he worked for Malek-Ashtar University of Technology, which is associated with Iran’s Ministry of Defense. On the billboard announcing his death, he is referred to as “Dr. Shahram Amiri.”

Like his academic credentials, Amiri’s life is shrouded in mystery. In 2009, he traveled to Saudi Arabia for a Haj pilgrimage to Mecca. Upon his return to Iran in 2010, he claimed that American intelligence agents had abducted him in Saudi Arabia and wanted him to cooperate with them. He said he had evaded them. Some Iranian officials, including Aleaddin Boroujerdi, chairman of parliament’s national security and foreign policy committee, supported his claims that secret agents of both the US and Saudi Arabia had been involved in his abduction.

The US government denied the reports. Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that both directions of Amiri’s mysterious travels – to the United States from Mecca and then back to Iran – had been of his own volition. Clinton’s recently disclosed emails contain some items about Shahram Amiri that suggest the US government was not involved in kidnapping him.

At the time of his disappearance, the Washington Post reported that Amiri had given important information to the CIA in exchange for five million dollars. The New York Times wrote that he had been a CIA spy inside Iran for several years. The fate of the alleged payment, if any, remains unclear.

Upon his return to Iran, Amiri claimed that the US had offered him $50 million for his cooperation. It appears to be an exaggeration, and few took the claim seriously.

Iranian officials first claimed that Amiri’s trip to the US has been part of a plan. One official told Fars News that Amiri had been on a mission, and had succeeded in extracting “valuable detailed information from the Central Intelligence Agency.”

Some Iranian media offered another scenario. They wrote that Amiri had gone to the US voluntarily and had offered the Americans information about Iran’s nuclear program, but that since the information had been trivial, the Americans had declined his help, and he had had to return to Iran.

 

From Hero to Prisoner

After Amiri received his hero’s welcome, reports began to emerge inside Iran about his arrest and interrogation.  A few months later, these reports were confirmed by his family, and by Saeed Jalili, who was then secretary of Iran’s supreme national security council. Jalili told the German weekly Der Spiegel that Amiri was being investigated by the Iranian government.

Now, Iranian media have another scenario, which seems more believable. Some outlets have written that Amiri returned to Iran because he was worried about his family. In an interview with Saham News after his arrest, Amiri’s family said that, a month before his return to Iran, they had been put under intense pressure and that “we had been taken hostage.” In other words, Iranian security agencies had used his family to force him to return to Iran.

None of these scenarios can be categorically confirmed or denied. What is known is that Amiri was arrested in 2010. According to his family, on July 13, 2012, a military court sentenced him to ten years in prison and five years' exile for activities against national security, secret cooperation with a hostile government, and providing “the enemy” with classified information. 

In the past five years, Amiri’s family appealed to whomever they could, including government agencies, the Iranian parliament, and the office of the supreme leader, but could not get any information. Now they have been informed of his execution by hanging.

Amiri was buried in the western city of Kermanshah, taking his secrets with him.

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