Iran: Police say they have arrested five suspects allegedly linked to the Mossad

Iranian police have arrested the alleged leader and four other members of a spy ring suspected of being linked to Israel’s intelligence services, Iranian law enforcement said today.

He did not give the nationalities of those arrested but said they had received training in armed operations and sabotage.

“The five members of this spy network who were arrested were given various promises by the Mossad, including financial promises, in order to collect information from important areas throughout the country,” the law enforcement agency said in a statement carried by the semi-official ILNA news agency. .

In Israel, the prime minister’s office, which oversees the Mossad foreign spy agency, declined to comment on the arrests.

Iran and Israel are longtime enemies and are now embroiled in a dispute over Iran’s nuclear program. Israel accuses Iran of supporting military attacks against it, while Iran says Israel has carried out a number of assassinations of Iranian officials, including a high-ranking official in May. Israel neither confirms nor denies such actions.

Yesterday, Wednesday, Iran’s intelligence minister, Esmail Khatib, said Tehran had prevented subversive actions by the “Zionist regime” — as Iran calls Israel. Iranian security forces have successfully carried out a number of operations against Israel in recent months, he said, without elaborating on what they consisted of.

Last week, Iran’s security forces said they had arrested members of a network of agents working for Israel who entered Iran from Iraqi Kurdistan to carry out sabotage and what they called “terrorist operations”.