Iran on Saturday executed former Deputy Defense Minister Alireza Akbari, a British-Iranian national, Reuters reported, citing the judiciary's Mizan news agency.
Akbari had been sentenced to death on charges of spying for Britain.
He served as Deputy Defense Minister when Ali Shamkhani was minister from 1997 to 2005, part of the administration of reformist President Mohammad Khatami. He had been a close ally of Shamkhani - currently the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council - since the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s.
Akbari also served in other security roles including as an advisor to the Iranian navy, and led the implementation of UN resolution 598 that ended the Iran-Iraq war in 1988, according to Reuters.
According to a caption in a video aired by Iran's state news agency IRNA on Thursday, Akbari moved to Britain after being briefly detained and released on bail in 2008
He was arrested in 2019. In an audio recording broadcast by BBC Persian, Akbari said he had returned to Tehran following an invitation by a senior Iranian diplomat involved in Tehran's nuclear talks with world powers.
In that recording, he said security authorities pressured judges to issue a sentence carrying the death penalty against him. "The tribunal agreed to release me on a low bail but the Intelligence Ministry stopped that. The Supreme Court voted against the death penalty, but the Intelligence Ministry imposed its will by threatening the judge."
Akbari also said he had made false confessions as a result of torture. "With more than 3,500 hours of torture, psychedelic drugs, and physiological and psychological pressure methods, they took away my will. They drove me to the brink of madness...and forced me to make false confessions by force of arms and death threats," he said.
"They would tell me: 'If you resist, we will send you to the dark cells of Evin prison where you'll face an interrogator with a whip.'"
Reuters also noted that Iranian state media broadcast a video on Thursday that they said showed that Akbari played a role in the 2020 assassination of Iran's top nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who was killed in a 2020 attack outside Tehran which authorities blamed at the time on Israel. In the video, Akbari did not confess to involvement in the assassination, but said a British agent had asked for information about Fakhrizadeh.
Britain condemned the execution of Akbari. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called it "a callous and cowardly act carried out by a barbaric regime with no respect for the human rights of their own people".
Iran regularly claims to have captured individuals who are accused of spying for Israel, the US, Britain and other countries.
There has long been a concern over the number of executions in Iran. In early December, the Norway-based group Iran Human Rights said that Iran had executed more than 500 people up to that point in 2022.