Iran executed a man it said worked as a spy for Israel’s Mossad intelligence service, according to the judiciary’s Mizan news agency, in a case announced the same day that United Nations experts condemned what they called a dramatic escalation in executions across the country.
Mizan identified the man as Bahman Choubi Asl and said he was a database expert who had worked on sensitive telecommunications projects. It described him as a trusted Mossad asset and said he had provided information linked to routes used to import electronic devices. The agency said the Supreme Court had rejected his appeal before the hanging was carried out on Monday.
The case appears to have been handled largely outside public scrutiny. Mizan did not say when he was arrested, and the claim had not previously been reported by Iranian media or human rights organizations, according to the report. No evidence was presented in the account beyond the state allegation that he had been involved in espionage and had been convicted on a charge translated as corruption on Earth.
The execution came against a backdrop of unusually heavy use of the death penalty in Iran this year. UN human rights experts said more than 1,000 executions had been recorded in the first nine months of 2025, already exceeding last year’s total. They said the scale of the killings was staggering and warned that the pattern represented a grave violation of the right to life.
The experts said roughly half of the known executions were tied to drug offenses, while a smaller share involved security-related allegations such as espionage, corruption on Earth and enmity against God. They said the number of hangings had risen sharply since 2021 and had accelerated further after the June war between Iran and Israel.
According to the UN account, Choubi Asl was the 11th man executed for alleged spying for Israel in 2025, with nine of those hangings taking place after the 12-day war between the two countries in June. That detail underscores how closely the Iranian authorities have linked internal security cases to their broader confrontation with Israel.
Rights groups have repeatedly argued that many of the trials leading to executions in Iran fall short of international legal standards. The UN experts said the international community should not remain silent and urged states to use diplomatic pressure to halt the execution campaign. Iran has repeatedly defended the death penalty as a punishment reserved for the most serious crimes, but the latest case again puts its use under international scrutiny.
The timing also highlighted another point of friction. The UN experts said Iran’s fast-growing execution tally includes a large number of people convicted of drug-related offenses, a category that international law does not generally treat as a capital crime. They said the government was operating executions at an industrial scale.
Iran has not publicly responded to the UN criticism in the report. The case of Choubi Asl adds to a year in which the death penalty has remained one of the country’s most controversial instruments of state power, and one that is drawing increasingly urgent warnings from rights monitors abroad.
