TEHRAN, Iran -- Iran executed a nuclear scientist who appeared in the U.S. in 2010 and then returned to the Islamic Republic under mysterious circumstances a few months later, an Iranian official said Sunday, acknowledging for the first time that the nation secretly detained, tried and convicted a man whom Iranian authorities once heralded as a hero.
Shahram Amiri vanished in 2009 while on a religious pilgrimage to Muslim holy sites in Saudi Arabia, only to reappear a year later in a series of online videos filmed in the United States. He then walked into the Iranian interests section at the Pakistani Embassy in Washington and demanded to be sent home.
In interviews, Amiri described being kidnapped and held against his will by Saudi and American spies. U.S. officials said at the time, however, that Amiri, an expert in radiation detection, agreed to leave Iran and was offered $5 million to provide information on his country's nuclear development, but he left the United States before any payments were made. Reports in foreign media said he had willingly defected to the United States in an operation planned by the CIA.
It was unclear when the execution occurred, though he was apparently hanged during a week when Iran executed a group of militants, a year after Iran struck a deal with the U.S. and five other world powers to restrict the scope of Iran's nuclear program. That accord led to the lifting of some economic sanctions in January.
Speaking to journalists Sunday, Iranian judiciary spokesman Gholamhosein Mohseni Ejehi said Amiri was convicted of spying charges in a death-sentence case upheld by an appeals court.
"This person who had access to the country's secret and classified information had been linked to our hostile and No. 1 enemy, America, the Great Satan," Ejehi said. "He provided the enemy with vital and secret information of the country."
Ejehi did not explain why authorities never announced Amiri's conviction, though he said Amiri had access to lawyers.
News about Amiri, born in 1977, had been scant since his return to Iran. Last year, his father, Asgar Amiri, told the BBC's Farsi-language service that his son had been held at a secret site. Ejehi said Amiri's family mistakenly believed he only received a 10-year prison sentence.
On Tuesday, Iran announced it had executed a number of criminals, describing them mainly as militants from the country's Kurdish minority. Then, an obituary notice for Amiri circulated in his hometown of Kermanshah, a city some 310 miles southwest of Tehran, according to the Iranian daily newspaper Shargh.
Manoto, a private satellite television channel based in London, first reported Saturday that Amiri had been executed. BBC Farsi also quoted Amiri's mother as saying that her son's neck had rope burns.
Amiri's disappearance came as Western nations worked to thwart Iran's nuclear program under the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The Stuxnet computer virus, widely believed to be a joint U.S.-Israeli creation, had begun disrupting thousands of centrifuges at a uranium enrichment facility in Iran. The U.S. also actively recruited nuclear scientists to defect, while a series of bombings killed others. Iran blamed the bombings on Israel, but no one has taken credit for those attacks.
In June 2010, a shaky online video emerged of Amiri saying he had been kidnapped by American and Saudi agents and was in Tucson, Ariz.
A short time later, he appeared in a professionally shot online video near a chess set, saying he wanted to earn a doctorate in America and return to Iran if an "opportunity of safe travel" presented itself. His wife and son remained behind in Iran.
"I have not done any activity against my homeland," he said. But soon, another clip by him contradicted that. Then he appeared at the Pakistani Embassy wanting to return to Iran.
Hillary Clinton, who was then U.S. secretary of state, stressed that Amiri had been in the United States "of his own free will."
"He is free to go," she said.
Analysts abroad suggested that Iranian authorities may have threatened Amiri's family, forcing him to return.
When he returned to Iran and was welcomed with flowers by government officials, Amiri said Saudi and American officials had kidnapped him while he visited the Saudi holy city of Medina. He also said Israeli agents were present at his interrogations and that CIA officers offered him $50 million to remain in America.
"I was under the harshest mental and physical torture," he said.
Amiri's case indirectly found its way back into the spotlight in the U.S. last year with the release of State Department emails sent and received by Clinton, now the Democratic presidential candidate. An email forwarded to Clinton by senior adviser Jake Sullivan on July 5, 2010 -- nine days before Amiri returned to Tehran -- appears to refer to the scientist.
"We have a diplomatic, 'psychological' issue, not a legal one. Our friend has to be given a way out," the email by Richard Morningstar, a former State Department special envoy for Eurasian energy, read. "We should recognize his concerns and frame it in terms of a misunderstanding with no malevolent intent and that we will make sure there is no recurrence."
Another email, sent by Sullivan on July 12, 2010, appears to obliquely refer to the scientist just hours before his appearance at the Pakistani Embassy became widely known.
"The gentleman ... has apparently gone to his country's interests section because he is unhappy with how much time it has taken to facilitate his departure," Sullivan wrote. "This could lead to problematic news stories in the next 24 hours."
Information for this article was contributed by Nasser Karimi, Jon Gambrell and Amir Vahdat of The Associated Press; by Brian Murphy of The Washington Post; and by Ladane Nasseri of Bloomberg News.
A Section on 08/08/2016