Iranian men guilty of spying on UK critics

A UK jury found two Iranian men guilty on Thursday of spying for Iran's intelligence service on targets including London-based journalists, a lawyer and a media production professional.

Mostafa Sepahvand, 41, and Farhad Manesh, 46, were convicted at London's Woolwich Crown Court of engaging in conduct likely to assist Iran's intelligence service. They had denied the charge. A third defendant, Shapoor Noori, 57, was cleared of the same charge.

Prosecutors said the surveillance and reconnaissance took place between August 2024 and March 2025. The men were accused of visiting addresses linked to targets, taking photos and videos, and using platforms including ChatGPT to research them online.

Frank Ferguson of the Crown Prosecution Service's Special Crime and Counter Terrorism Division called it a calculated operation to spy on critics of the Iranian regime. He said Sepahvand and Manesh had been promised rewards to send intelligence to contacts in Iran, and that Sepahvand was willing to commit serious violence against targets.

Prosecutors said Sepahvand intended to physically carry out a violent attack against at least one target. They rejected his claim that he had been coerced and said he was a willing participant who sought £150,000 and help resolving a theft conviction in Iran. A voice note transcript read to the jury quoted Sepahvand saying that if a target was at an address given to him, he would “finish him or her off”.

The targets included Iran International journalists Kambiz Hosseini and Mojtaba Pourmohsen, Jonathan Turner of UK Lawyers for Israel, and a fourth person who was not named. Tehran has labelled Iran International a terror organisation.

Manesh and Noori were acquitted of engaging in surveillance and reconnaissance with the intention that serious violence would be committed by others.

The case comes after UK interior minister Shabana Mahmood said Iran and Russia were using proxies and thugs in Britain. The UK government has also accused Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of involvement in other security threats in the country. Iran denied a separate UK claim that it was behind a security scare at the Royal Air Force base of Fairford in southwest England.