The Diplomat
The Spanish government yesterday summoned Iran’s ambassador to Madrid, Hassan Ghashghavi, to protest the execution of British-Iranian citizen Alireza Akbari, who had been accused of spying and working for MI6, the UK intelligence service.
In a statement issued last night by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the government “strongly condemns” the execution and announced that it had summoned the ambassador to express its rejection of the execution.
The Diplomat has learned that Hassan Ghashghavi has been summoned to the department headed by José Manuel Albares on Monday. There, according to the Foreign Ministry, he will insist on Spain’s call to the Iranian authorities “to put an end to executions and death sentences”.
The communiqué reiterates Spain’s position against such punishment “in all countries of the world and in all circumstances”.
The Spanish government has taken this decision hours after the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Rishi Sunak, via his Twitter account, described the execution as “a callous and cowardly act, carried out by a barbaric regime that has no respect for the human rights of its own people”.
The British government also summoned the Iranian chargé d’affaires in London to the British Foreign Office, whose head, James Cleverly, announced the imposition of sanctions against Iran’s attorney general, Mohamad Yafar Montazeri, on the grounds that, from his position, “he is at the heart of the use of the death penalty” in the ayatollahs’ regime.
Other European countries, such as France, also summoned Iranian diplomatic representatives in their respective capitals to protest the execution of Alireza Akbari, who was deputy defence minister during the mandate of former Iranian president Mohammad Mohammad Khatami (1997-2005), and whom the current Iranian government accused of being one of the “most important agents” of MI6, the British intelligence service, and a “master of espionage”.
A few days ago, the European Union summoned Iran’s ambassador to the EU institutions, Hosein Dehghani, to condemn two executions of demonstrators in Iran. The governments of France and Germany did the same, while others, such as Norway, expressed their rejection of the application of the death penalty to demonstrators and their call to “respond to the protests with meaningful reforms”.
In recent months, the Spanish government has issued statements condemning the executions, but this is the first time that it has summoned the Iranian ambassador since it did so on 28 September -twelve days after the death of young Mahsa Amini after she was arrested by the morality police- to protest against the repression of demonstrations and the violation of women’s rights in that country.
