Mostafa Sepahvand tells London court an IRGC officer threatened to kill him

Mostafa Sepahvand, 41, the main defendant in the case of a plot to attack Iran International journalists in Britain, told Woolwich Crown Court in London on Thursday, 15 October 2026, that a man he believes to be an officer of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) had threatened to kill him and his mother. British prosecutors reject this account and say he worked for money. DIAR had earlier reported the opening of the trial.

From the witness box, Sepahvand called the man "Abi" and said he lives in the English city of Wolverhampton. According to him, the man contacted him by video call in 2024, after a video of him was posted on a dental clinic's Instagram page, and showed the Islamic Republic's flag during the call. Sepahvand said he ignored the threats at first, but responded once his mother was brought into it. He added that afterwards his car window was smashed, people entered his home in Westminster and his mother's house in Iran was raided, although he admitted he had not seen who was responsible.

The charges and the targets of the plot

Three men are on trial in the case: Mostafa Sepahvand, Farhad Javadi-Manesh, 46, and Shapoor Qalehali Khani Noori, 57. Prosecutors say that from August 2024 to March 2025 they gathered information for the Islamic Republic's foreign intelligence service to prepare serious violence against at least one target. Mojtaba Pourmohsen and Kambiz Hosseini, two Iran International journalists, and Jonathan Turner, a co-founder of the pro-Israel group UK Lawyers for Israel, were among the targets.

According to the prosecutor, Sepahvand said in messages that he would finish off a target for £150,000 and had been promised that his criminal case in Iran would also be resolved. The two other defendants accept that they visited addresses and took photos and videos, but say they did not know they were working for the Islamic Republic's intelligence apparatus. All three deny the charges against them under Britain's National Security Act.

Background of transnational repression

In court, Sepahvand spoke of years of persecution in Iran, of fleeing to Tehran under his brother's name and of his brother's arrest in 2018. The case is one of several opened in Europe in recent months, including the conviction of two IRGC Quds Force spies by a court in Hamburg. In Britain, too, the branch of HispanTV, a channel of the Islamic Republic's state broadcaster, was reported to the police.

The Woolwich case shows the Islamic Republic has gone as far as the streets of London to silence the free Persian-language media.