TEHRAN — The man sentenced to death for spying for the CIA and Mossad on the whereabouts of martyr Lieutenant General Qassem Soleimani had nothing to do with Iranian military, according to Tasnim.

Seyed Mahmoud Mousavi-Majd was neither a military staffer, nor a member of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), nor even a member of the Basij forces who go to Syria voluntarily for the fight against terrorism, according to documents exclusively obtained by Tasnim.

The convict had reportedly left Iran before the victory of the Islamic Revolution in 1979 when he was a child, and grew up in Syria.

Mousavi-Majd established connections with a number of Iranian military advisers in Syria and began a career as a driver.

Under the guise of a driver, the spy was gathering intelligence for the U.S. and Israel and received a salary of $5,000 a month from the CIA and Mossad.

Last week, Judiciary spokesman Gholamhossein Esmaeili announced that Mousavi-Majd was sentenced to death.

“Recently, a person named Seyed Mahmoud Mousavi-Majd, who had connections with Mossad and CIA and provided them with intelligence on security issues such as the Guards Quds Force and the location of martyr Qassem Soleimani in exchange for U.S. dollars was sentenced to death by the Revolution Court, and the verdict has been confirmed by the Supreme Court and will be implemented soon,” Esmaeili announced during a press conference on June 9.

The Judiciary then said the case of Mousavi-Majd has nothing to do with the American assassination of General Soleimani in Baghdad in early January.

Mousavi-Majd was arrested months before that incident and the court had issued an initial ruling on his case on August 25, 2019, the Judiciary said, explaining that the convict has never been released from custody since apprehension.

On January 3, U.S. President Donald Trump ordered airstrikes that killed General Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the second-in-command of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Units (PMU), in Baghdad’s international airport.

Soleimani was recognized internationally as a legendary commander in the war against terrorist groups, especially Daesh (ISIS).

In the early hours of January 8, the IRGC fired dozens of ballistic missiles at a military airbase hosting U.S. forces in Iraq as part of its promised “tough revenge” for the terrorist attack.

MH/PA