‘National Security Threat’: Boat Migrant Convicted of Spying for Iran

Two so-called asylum seekers have been convicted of spying and planning an attack in Britain for Iranian intelligence, prompting Nigel Farage to once again warn of the security threat from Britain’s open southern border.

Mostafa Sepahvand, 41, and Farhad Javadi Manesh, 46, were found guilty of “working on behalf of the Iranian state and… assisting a foreign intelligence service, contrary to the National Security Act 2023” at Woolwich Crown Court on Thursday after a month-long trial. The Iranian citizens, who came to Britain in the guise of being asylum seekers snuck into the country in the back of a lorry in 2016 in Sepahvand’s case, and on a small migrant boat in 2019 in Manesh’s.

Both men were unemployed and were arrested in their beds in daylight raids on their London addresses.

The men had been performing reconnaissance on a number of journalists working with Iran International, a London-based Persian news organisation that is highly critical of the Iranian Islamic Republic. The court heard that the surveillance was being  fed back to Iran and was building up to attacks. The men also spied on a British lawyer who was a co-founder of the UK Lawyers For Israel pressure group, reports the BBC.

The court was told Sepahvand was preparing a “violent attack” and had said to his handler in Iran that he would be “finishing off” one of the targets in return for a payment of £150,000. He was also found to be asking Tehran to wipe his criminal record back home in return for spying work.

The head of the Criminal Prosecution Service said “This was a calculated operation to spy on those critical of the Iranian regime… Sepahvand himself was willing to go beyond surveillance to commit serious violence against their targets. Thankfully, the defendants were stopped before any attack could take place.”

Sepahvand had attempted to argue that he wasn’t a volunteer for Iranian intelligence but was working for them out of fear of potential repercussions if he refused. The court heard that he was already feeling aggrieved with his Iranian masters because they hadn’t paid him what he thought was owed.

Further, he said he wouldn’t be capable of planning an attack plot because “I wouldn’t harm an animal, let alone a human”, reports CourtNews.  Manesh, meanwhile, had claimed he only photographed the Iran International offices in London only because it is “a beautiful building”.

The Iranians were described as “proxies” working for Tehran and “useful idiots”, willing to do the bidding of Tehran including “eliminating” a target in return for personal benefit.

Sentencing will take place in December.

Brexit trailblazer and Reform UK party leader Nigel Farage has repeatedly warned about the acute security risk to Britain from leaving its southern border defacto open to so-called asylum seekers who arrive in the country in considerable numbers with no vetting. Iranians Sepahvand and Manesh were both accepted as legitimate asylum seekers by the British state and given leave to remain.

Mr Farage said on Thursday after the conviction: “I have said multiple times in and out of Parliament that Iranian spies were breaking into the country illegally. The crisis in the channel is a national security threat. Why does no one listen?”.

As reported earlier this year, it is known that Iran is using Britain’s porous maritime border to sneak agents into the United Kingdom. As stated:

While some attempts have been blocked, with over 30,000 Iranians having successfully reached British soil by crossing the English Channel illegally, it is unclear to what extent attempts by intelligence assets to infiltrate the country have already been successful… Mr Farage said that he had a “source within the Iranian-Persian diaspora,” who claimed that Iranian agents had already crossed the Channel by then.

The Reform leader said that his source knew “for a fact that over the course of the last few weeks, there have been Iranian operatives crossing the Channel in small boats… To put that in simple terms, we are importing terrorists into our country from across the English Channel.”