A UK jury on Thursday found two Iranian men guilty of spying for Iran's intelligence service, as a chief prosecutor said it showed Tehran's willingness to use "proxies" to target the regime's critics abroad.
Mostafa Sepahvand, 41, and Farhad Manesh, 46, carried out surveillance and reconnaissance on targets that included two journalists, a lawyer and a media production professional between August 2024 and March last year, with Sepahvand also prepared to commit physical attacks.
The men, who lived in London, had denied engaging in conduct likely to assist Iran's intelligence service but were found guilty by a jury at the capital's Woolwich Crown Court.
A third defendant, Shapoor Noori, 57, was cleared of the same charge.
The defendants were accused of visiting addresses linked to their targets, taking photos and videos, and using platforms such as ChatGPT to research them online.
"This was a calculated operation to spy on those critical of the Iranian regime," said Frank Ferguson of the Crown Prosecution Service's Special Crime and Counter Terrorism Division.
"Sepahvand and Manesh were promised rewards to send intelligence back to contacts in Iran, and Sepahvand himself was willing to go beyond surveillance to commit serious violence against their targets.
"Cases like this show Iranian intelligence's willingness to use proxies to target the regime's critics abroad," the chief prosecutor added, according to AFP.
The prosecution said Sepahvand had intended to physically carry out a "violent attack" against at least one of the targets.
Those targeted for surveillance included journalists Kambiz Hosseini and Mojtaba Pourmohsen, who work for the London-based Farsi-language Iran International television news network, which Tehran has labelled a terror organization.
The third target was Jonathan Turner, a founder member of the group UK Lawyers for Israel. The fourth person has not been named.
Sepahvand claimed he had been coerced but prosecutors labelled his claims "bogus", describing him as a willing participant who was looking to be paid £150,000 ($200,000) and have a conviction for theft in Iran "fixed" in return for his actions.
In a transcript of a voice note read to the jury, Sepahvand said if the target was at the address given to him he would "finish him or her off".
Manesh and Noori were acquitted of engaging in surveillance and reconnaissance with the intention that serious violence against a person in the UK would be committed by others.
The case comes after the UK's interior minister Shabana Mahmood said that both Iran and Russia were "using proxies and thugs to do their dirty work on our shores".
The UK government in July banned the Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a threat to national security, alongside an Iran-linked group accused of a series of attacks against the Jewish community.
In June, 22 countries, including the UK, United States and European nations, blamed the IRGC and its foreign operations branch, the Quds Force, for plotting against Iranian dissidents, journalists and Jewish communities.
The IMCR have claimed multiple attacks, including an arson attack in London against four ambulances of the Hatzola Jewish charity.
Last month, the British government again took aim at the IRGC, accusing it of being behind a major scare at a UK airbase used by the United States. Iran denied the claim.
The security incident at the Royal Air Force base of Fairford in southwest England in September involved a group of men in several white vans engaged in "suspicious" activity in the middle of the night.
The US Justice Department on Tuesday charged three men described as "Iranian operatives" with directing others to carry out numerous attacks and the Fairford "terrorist plot".
The United States, which had been using the base for its war in Iran, withdrew all its B-1 bombers from the site following the incident.
