Iranian Court Gives Jail Terms to 2 Suspects for Spying for US, Israel

(FNA)- An Iranian court issued 10-year prison terms for two suspects on charges of spying for the US and Israel.

"The two persons were sentenced to 10-year prison terms by Tehran's Islamic Revolutionary Court," Judiciary Spokesman Gholamhossein Mohseni Eje'i told reporters in Tehran on Sunday.

Yet, the spokesman did not reveal the identity of the two convicts.

Iranian Intelligence Minister Seyed Mahmoud Alawi had announced in October that the country's security forces had arrested several spies in the Southern province of Bushehr which hosts the nation's first nuclear power plant.

"Thanks to the vigilance of the Intelligence Ministry forces who monitor the moves of the foreign intelligence services, some agents who intended to carry out surveillance and intelligence gathering for the foreigners in Bushehr province have been identified and sent to justice," Alawi said at the time.

He also warned that foreign spy agencies, including the CIA, Mossad and MI6, were seeking to target and carry out sabotage operations against Iran's nuclear and defense programs, yet he stressed that his forces knew how to fool the foreign spies.

"Some (spying) services like Mossad, the MI6 and the CIA and the countries which are enemies of Iran are naturally in pursuit of negative objectives in the Islamic Republic or sometimes they act directly and leave negative effects in political, economic and social fields," Alawi said.

"And sometimes they make use of other spying services for proxy jobs or use people's internet pages," he added.

"Our nuclear, defense and missile industries and advanced technologies are the arenas in which they seek to gain intelligence and carry out sabotage operations," Alawi said.

He, meantime, stressed that the Iranian intelligence forces had kept vigilant, identified the hostile spy agencies' weak and strong points and adopted the necessary actions to manage these spy agencies.