Convicted of spying for the benefit of Saudi Arabia, three leaders of an Iranian Arab separatist group, in exile in Denmark, were sentenced on Wednesday March 2 to six to eight years in prison by Danish justice.
Read alsoEspionage: “
compliance
” as a legal Trojan horse
Two of the three members of the Arab Movement for the Liberation of Ahvaz (ASMLA) will also be expelled at the end of their sentence, according to the verdict announced in a press release by the Roskilde court, west of Copenhagen.
In this case, which had illustrated the export of Saudi-Iranian tensions on European soil, the leader of the movement, Habib Yabor Kabi, was sentenced to eight years in prison and his brother, Tamim Farouk Beck, to seven years.
Habib Yabor Kabi's son-in-law, Jacob Mohamed, was sentenced to six years in prison but did not lose his Danish nationality.
The prosecution had requested 12 years in prison.
The three men, aged 40 to 51, had also been found guilty of "
promoting terrorism
", by supporting the activities of the armed wing of ASMLA.
According to public television DR, which had access to documents from the trial held behind closed doors, the trio, imprisoned since February 2020, had notably drawn up a list of 100 names of individuals and companies to be monitored, which they had sent to the Saudi services.
The self-determination of the province of Ahvaz
The separatist organization, considered terrorist by Iran and whose leaders reside in Denmark and the Netherlands, defends the self-determination of the province of Ahvaz, in the south-west of Iran.
It is paradoxically a project of assassination of one of these three men thwarted by the Danish police which had put the counterintelligence of the Scandinavian country on the track of their activities.
Despite Tehran's denial, Copenhagen accused the Iranian authorities of wanting to liquidate this senior ASMLA official, in retaliation for the bloody attack (24 dead) in Ahvaz, in southwestern Iran, in September 2018. At the end of a spectacular manhunt which had seriously disrupted public transport, a Norwegian of Iranian origin, since sentenced by Danish justice to seven years in prison, had been arrested.
Nearly a year and a half later, the Danish authorities announced the indictment of the leader of ASMLA, along with the other two members of the group.