Two men charged with spying for Iran targeting London Jewish community
Two men have been charged with spying for Iran after allegedly carrying out surveillance of sites linked to London’s Jewish community, British police said on Wednesday.
Two men have been charged with spying for Iran after allegedly carrying out surveillance of sites linked to London’s Jewish community, British police said on Wednesday.
Nematollah Shahsavani, 40, a dual British-Iranian national, and Alireza Farasati, 22, an Iranian national, were charged under the National Security Act with assisting a foreign intelligence service.
The Crown Prosecution Service said the charges relate to activities including “reconnaissance of targets” between July and August 2025.
Counter Terrorism Policing said the investigation focused on alleged surveillance of locations and individuals linked to the Jewish community in London.
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Vicki Evans described the charges as “extremely serious” and said police would be “relentless” in pursuing those who threaten public safety.
“We fully recognise that the public - and in particular the Jewish community - will be concerned, but I hope this investigation reassures them that we will not hesitate to take action,” she said.
The two men are due to appear at Westminster Magistrates’ Court on Thursday.
Mizan said Keyvani was executed on Wednesday morning after his death sentence was upheld by the Supreme Court. He had been accused of passing “images and information of sensitive locations” to officers of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency.
The report said Keyvani was arrested in Savojbolagh on the fourth day of the 12-day war in June. Authorities said the case had gone through legal procedures, but no independent evidence supporting the allegations was made public.
Later in the day, Swedish Foreign Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard said in a statement that a Swedish citizen was executed in Iran without naming him. However, it confirmed that the person was arrested in June.
The legal proceedings leading up to the execution did not meet the standards of due process, she added.
The semi-official Tasnim news agency said Keyvani had been detained by the Revolutionary Guards’ intelligence arm and was found with cash, vehicles and what it described as advanced communication and surveillance equipment.
Tasnim also reported that he had allegedly been recruited through online contact and trained abroad before returning to Iran, though these claims could not be independently verified.
Keyvani is the latest in a series of executions in Iran involving individuals accused of espionage for Israel, particularly since the outbreak of the June war.
Iran has one of the highest execution rates in the world and has long used the death penalty in national security cases, including allegations of spying. Following the conflict, rights groups and international media have reported a sharp increase in arrests and executions on such charges.
The Telegraph reported that executions in Iran have surged since the June war, citing data from human rights group HRANA indicating that the number of executions has risen significantly, including for those accused of links to Israel. The Sunday Times has also reported that dozens more people could face execution on similar charges.
Defense Minister Israel Katz said Larijani had been killed in the strikes, while the Israeli military confirmed it targeted him in Tehran. The military separately said a strike killed Soleimani, head of the Basij paramilitary force, along with other senior officials.
Katz used stark language in comments released by his office after a security assessment.
“Larijani and the Basij commander were eliminated overnight and joined the head of the annihilation program, Khamenei, and all the eliminated members of the axis of evil, in the depths of hell,” Katz said.
The Israeli military said Soleimani was struck at a tent camp recently established by the Basij after earlier Israeli attacks damaged several headquarters used by the paramilitary organization.
According to the military, the strike also killed the deputy commander of the Basij and several other senior officials.
The Basij, which operates under the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, has long been associated with the enforcement of ideological policies and the suppression of dissent inside Iran.
The reported killings mark one of the most significant decapitation strikes against Iran’s leadership structure since the outbreak of the current conflict.
Larijani: Insider and wartime power broker
Ali Ardashir Larijani, born on June 3, 1945 in Najaf, Iraq, rose to become one of the most influential figures in the Islamic Republic over four decades.
He came from a clerical family originally from Mazandaran province in northern Iran. His father, Hashem Larijani, was a cleric, and several of his brothers also held senior posts within the Iranian state.
His political career began in the early years after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, when he joined the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and later moved into government posts.
Larijani served as deputy labor minister and later as deputy minister of information and communications technology before he was appointed in 1994 as the head of the state broadcasting organization, Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB).
He led the state media network for a decade, a role that gave him a position in shaping the government’s propaganda during a politically turbulent period.
In 2005 he was appointed secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, placing him at the center of Iran’s security policy and nuclear negotiations. In that role he served as Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator in talks with European powers.
Larijani later entered parliamentary politics and became speaker of the Iranian parliament in 2008, a position he held until 2020.
He ran for president in 2005 but finished sixth, and later attempted to run again in 2021 and 2024. Both candidacies were blocked by the Guardian Council, which vets candidates for high office.
In August 2025, he returned to the center of national security policy when he was appointed once again as secretary of the Supreme National Security Council.
Following the death of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei during the 2026 US-Israeli strikes, some analysts and media reports described Larijani as acting as Iran’s wartime leader, relying on long-standing ties to security institutions and clerical networks.
The United States imposed sanctions on Larijani in January 2026 over his role in the violent suppression of protests inside Iran.
Iranian on social media blame him as the mastermind behind the massacre of around 36,500 protesters during January uprising. Israeli officials said their overnight strike targeted him in Tehran.
Soleimani: Basij commander
Gholamreza Soleimani, born in 1963 in Farsan in Iran’s Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari province, built his career inside the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and the Basij militia.
Despite sharing the surname, he was not related to Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the Guard’s Quds Force who was killed in a US drone strike in Iraq in January 2020.
Soleimani joined the Basij as a volunteer during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s and later became a member of the Revolutionary Guards.
He steadily rose through the ranks and eventually became commander of the Basij Organization in 2019.
The Basij, a paramilitary network with branches across Iran, operates under the authority of the Revolutionary Guards and has played a key role in enforcing ideological policies and mobilizing supporters of the Islamic Republic.
The force has also been widely accused by human rights groups of participating in violent crackdowns on protests.
Soleimani was sanctioned by the European Union in 2021 for his role in the repression of those protests.
The United States Treasury placed him on its Specially Designated Nationals list later the same year.
Additional sanctions were imposed by the United Kingdom and Canada in connection with human rights abuses.
The strikes occurred as Israel and the United States continued a broad aerial campaign against Iranian military and nuclear infrastructure.
Meanwhile, Israeli air defenses detected a new ballistic missile launch from Iran toward northern Israel on Tuesday.
It entered their bodies – in sleepless nights, stomach illness, obsessive counting of the dead, and a persistent sense that something in their relationship to Iran had been permanently altered.
Now, two months later, as the United States and Israel wage war against the Islamic Republic and another far stricter internet blackout grips the country, that earlier rupture is returning with renewed force.
Images of death, the disappearance of communication, and the uncertainty surrounding Iran’s future have reopened a wound many in the diaspora say never fully closed.
A new qualitative study by researcher Nazanin Shahbazi, a PhD student at the University of Manchester, helps explain why.
Based on eight in-depth interviews with politically engaged members of the Iranian diaspora conducted shortly after the January killings and end of internet shutdown, the research explores how people far from the violence nevertheless experienced the uprising and massacre as a personal rupture – one that reshaped their bodies, their sense of time, and even what it meant to say “I am Iranian.”
“The protests, the killings, the internet blackout and the blocked funerals were not separate chapters,” Shahbazi told Iran International. “For the people I spoke with they formed one continuous shock that reorganized their lives.”
Human rights organizations have documented the repression in detail – the shootings, the arrests, the intimidation of families and the pressure placed on relatives of the dead. What those reports cannot capture is how such violence lives on in those who witness it from afar.
“They can tell us what was done to people and roughly how many were killed,” Shahbazi said. “But they can’t show what it feels like to live with that in your body, your sleep, your relationships and your sense of future.”
Body keeps the score
One of the most striking patterns in the interviews is how often the experience of the massacre appeared in the body.
Participants described vomiting after seeing images of burned bodies, sudden weight gain, eczema, IBS flare-ups, breathlessness, grinding teeth and persistent insomnia. Some lost their appetite entirely. Others said their ordinary routines collapsed into constant monitoring of news from Iran.
“When words ran out, people kept returning to their bodies,” Shahbazi said. “Sudden vomiting, weight gained in twenty days, neck spasms or grinding teeth were how they registered what they could not yet fully think or articulate.”
The body, in this sense, became both witness and container.
Political violence was not simply something they analyzed or debated. It was something that settled into digestion, sleep, muscles and skin.
Shahbazi believes those reactions reveal dimensions of suffering that familiar categories like trauma or PTSD sometimes fail to capture.
“Diagnostic labels can flatten experience into symptom lists,” she said. “What people described were very concrete bodily dramas tied to images and events in Iran.”
Safe but summoned
Another recurring theme was the strange moral position created by exile.
The interviewees were physically safe – living in UK, Europe, North America or elsewhere outside Iran – yet many said they did not experience themselves as distant observers.
“I would describe their condition as safe but summoned,” Shahbazi said. “They lived outside the field of bullets but inside a field of responsibility.”
Again and again participants returned to a painful question: why am I here while others were killed?
Exile did not reduce the emotional weight of the uprising. In many cases it intensified it.
“Safety, mobility and an intact body were experienced not simply as privileges,” Shahbazi said. “They were felt as a kind of unpaid debt to those who stayed and faced lethal risk.”
That sense of symbolic debt helps explain why many interviewees described weeks in which work, sleep and daily routines collapsed into constant monitoring of events in Iran.
Some called friends inside the country repeatedly. Others spent hours tracking death tolls or watching newly emerging videos.
They were not simply following the news. They were trying to answer a moral demand they felt placed upon them.
Language at its limit
The scale of the violence also strained language itself. Participants repeatedly reached for extreme words – “catastrophe,” “slaughter,” or “something like a Holocaust” – because ordinary vocabulary seemed incapable of holding what they had seen.
“Everyday language felt too small,” Shahbazi said. “So people borrowed the biggest words they could find.”
Even those words felt insufficient.
Many interviewees hesitated as they spoke, qualifying their descriptions with phrases like “something like” or “nothing else really covers it.”
Numbers became another way of trying to grasp the event.
Several participants described compulsively tracking death tolls or attempting rough calculations of how many people might have been killed.
“Counting was a way of making the killings halfway thinkable,” Shahbazi said.
A different Iranian-ness
Despite the suffering described in the interviews, the research also uncovered something unexpected. Several participants said the uprising had changed how they understood their own identity.
For years, many had associated being Iranian internationally with embarrassment tied to the Islamic Republic’s image abroad. After the protests, that feeling began to shift.
Shahbazi said several participants described a “partial lifting of shame” when saying they were Iranian.
“In its place they spoke about pride in the courage and sacrifices of protesters,” she said.
Some described renewed attachment to Iranian culture, language and land. Others spoke about admiration for the mothers who stood at the forefront of demonstrations.
Shahbazi believes this shift may have political consequences as well.
“It recenters being Iranian around equality, justice and shared humanity,” she said, “rather than around the state’s ideology.”
That transformation remains fragile.
The war now unfolding and the renewed blackout mean that images of violence are again entering Iranian homes and diaspora communities alike.
But if the interviews reveal anything, it is that the event did not remain confined to the streets where it began.
As Shahbazi put it: “For many Iranians in the diaspora, the massacre did not stay on their screens; it cut into their bodies, their sense of time, and even the way they dare to say, ‘I am Iranian.’”
The players had been part of Iran’s women’s national team delegation competing abroad before leaving the team and seeking protection in Australia.
In a statement posted on social media, chief executive Kaz Patafta said Brisbane Roar was committed to providing a supportive environment for the players while they considered their next steps.
The crisis surrounding the team began earlier in the month when the players refused to sing the Iranian national anthem before their opening match against South Korea in AFC Women's Asian Cup.
The silent protest came shortly after the escalation of war involving Iran and the killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and was quickly condemned by state media in Tehran as an act of “wartime treason.”
In the days that followed, several members of the Iranian delegation sought asylum in Australia. But according to informed sources, pressure from Iranian authorities soon intensified, with messages relayed to the players through members of the team’s own staff urging them to abandon asylum plans and return to Iran.
One member of the technical staff, Zahra Meshkinkar, who had also sought asylum, has been relaying messages from Iranian football officials to players, encouraging them to withdraw their requests and rejoin the team.
Remaining members of the squad were later moved to Kuala Lumpur, where sources say the players have been kept under tight supervision in a hotel.
Journalists and outside visitors have been barred from entering, and some players have had their mobile phones confiscated or are allowed to use them only under the supervision of officials linked to the Iranian Football Federation.
Despite the earlier asylum requests, several players have now withdrawn their applications and are en route to return to Iran, after what sources described as sustained pressure on the team and warnings that their families could face consequences if they refused to go back.
Human rights groups have warned that athletes involved in the anthem protest could face punishment upon their return.
