Turkey and Qatar signed a mutual defense agreement Friday, as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the two countries would continue working together to prevent renewed war in the Persian Gulf region.
Erdogan's office announced the agreement as the Turkish president and Qatar's Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani held high-level talks in Istanbul aimed at strengthening bilateral cooperation.
The men convicted of spying on Iran International journalists in London worked from files sent from Iran that listed their targets’ photos, workplaces, cars and even the names of their pets, some of it gathered with ChatGPT, British counterterrorism police said.
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Vicki Evans, Britain’s senior national coordinator for counterterrorism policing, set out the evidence at a briefing held before Thursday’s verdicts and embargoed until them.
Mostafa Sepahvand, 41, and Farhad Javadi Manesh, 46, were convicted at Woolwich Crown Court of assisting a foreign intelligence service. A third man, Shapoor Qalehali Khani Noori, 57, was acquitted.
“The investigation also highlights the continuing and increasing threat to the UK from Iran,” Evans said. It was the fourth time police had prosecuted people who targeted Iran International staff or offices in London, she said.
The three men were arrested at their homes in west London on May 3, 2025, and held for two weeks, the maximum the National Security Act allows. Officers went through 534 gigabytes of data from their phones and devices, much of it in Persian.
Among it were the tasking documents. Their targets were two Iran International journalists, a lawyer linked to the group UK Lawyers for Israel, and a media production professional.
“The briefing documents were extraordinarily detailed,” Evans said. They included photographs of the targets, their workplace addresses, the makes and colors of their cars and, in some cases, the names of their pets. Some of the background on the targets’ careers and social media had been gathered with ChatGPT, police said.
The files reached Sepahvand from Iranian phone numbers belonging to people police say were Revolutionary Guards members or intermediaries for Iranian intelligence.
One contact, saved in his phone as Mostafa Ghorbani and believed to be an old school friend, was asked at one point to find out how much influence a man called “Haji” had and whether he worked for Iranian intelligence. Another, saved as “Mostafa’s friend, Amin,” was also linked to the Guards, police said.
Sepahvand led the operation, passed on instructions to the other two men and drove them around London in his Mercedes, police said.
In December 2024, the men went to a block of flats where they believed an Iran International journalist lived, and to homes they linked to a second journalist, filming at each. They returned several times that month.
In February 2025, Sepahvand was told to watch two business premises believed to be linked to Iran International, and the men filmed them in early March. They later deleted data from their phones, which may have included more footage.
Sepahvand’s motive was money and help clearing a theft conviction in Iran, police said. One message referred to a promise to resolve his case there and pay him £150,000, about $200,000, for completing the job. He demanded at least £10,000 upfront, and another message appeared to tie the full payment to finding the target and attacking them.
In voice notes to Ghorbani, he complained that he had not been paid for the surveillance. “Often, they receive very little of what they were promised,” Evans said, describing a pattern seen in other cases.
Sepahvand told the court he acted under duress. Police believe the attack he contemplated would have used a relatively unsophisticated weapon, possibly a knife.
Asked whether the aim was to kill, Evans said: “We would certainly say that there was an intention to cause serious harm.”
All three men are Iranian nationals who reached Britain between 2016 and 2022, claimed asylum and were granted temporary leave to remain, police said. They were not a sleeper cell, Evans said. They met through the Iranian community in west London and had no criminal record in Britain.
That marked a shift, she said, from foreign criminal proxies flown in and out of the country to Iranians already living in Britain and directed from abroad. British nationals were also being recruited.
“Those directing the activity seek to remain several steps removed from the people performing it,” she said.
The earlier cases against people targeting Iran International include an Austrian man jailed for three and a half years after he was caught surveilling the channel’s then offices in Chiswick, west London, in 2023, and two Romanian men jailed this year for a combined 20 years for the 2024 stabbing of presenter Pouria Zeraati outside his London home. Three people were charged in April over an arson attack on Iran International’s new offices.
Iran-linked operations had led to more than 50 arrests in Britain in the past year, Evans said, citing MI5 chief Ken McCallum.
The Islamic Republic will keep pursuing a nuclear weapon as long as it remains in power, and Washington should keep up military, economic and covert pressure even while it talks to Tehran, Roger Zakheim, director of the Ronald Reagan Institute, told Iran International.
Speaking on Veterans Day, Zakheim said President Donald Trump had set “the first principle” right by vowing to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, a promise he said Trump had made more than 90 times.
“My own view is that as long as this regime is in place, it will pursue a nuclear weapon,” he said. “So if he’s going to prevent the nuclear program, the regime will have to change as well.”
The interview came as Qatar stepped up its mediation. Its foreign ministry said on Tuesday that talks had made progress and that both sides had spoken positively about a diplomatic solution, a day after Qatar’s prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, met Trump at the White House. Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, called reports of negotiations or a meeting in Qatar “a pure lie.”
Zakheim, author of a new book on Reagan’s doctrine of peace through strength, said he had no objection to diplomacy, pointing to Reagan’s talks with Mikhail Gorbachev, as long as the pressure continues.
“I’m fine with talks to probe, to explore, to push, as long as we’re squeezing them at the same time: the blockade, the covert operation, the military presence, the ability to carry out a military operation at any moment,” he said. “If it’s diplomacy and everything else stops, I’d be very concerned.”
The US naval blockade of Iranian ports, first imposed in April, remains in place alongside a Treasury sanctions campaign the administration calls Economic Fury. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in Paris on Tuesday that the economic campaign was “so devastating that right now there is no need for major combat operations.”
Zakheim called the memorandum of understanding reached in June “a very flawed agreement.” Any new deal would need verification involving the United States, “not some third party we can’t trust or don’t know,” he said, and should be “ripped up” if Iran failed to comply.
The June 17 memorandum declared an end to military operations and set a 60-day window for a final deal on Iran’s nuclear program and sanctions. It soon unraveled over control of the Strait of Hormuz, and the deadline passed in August without an agreement.
“They’re just talking about talking,” Zakheim said.
Zakheim gave Trump high marks for Operation Midnight Hammer, the June 2025 US strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan, and for Operation Epic Fury, the US-Israeli campaign launched on February 28 that killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
“The decapitation, the attacks on the nuclear sites, taking out both the ballistic and cruise missile sites, has made this regime weaker,” he said.
But voters had soured on the war, he said, because the president “didn’t win decisively and got stuck in 140 days of diplomacy with a regime that will never compromise.”
He said he hoped a “very consequential covert program” was under way, with Washington backing those who want to replace the Islamic Republic. “We’ve never had an opportunity like the one we have right now to support the people in Iran who are freedom-loving,” he said, adding that Iran’s borders were “more porous than ever” and its skies open.
“It’s an unnatural regime that oppresses its people,” he said.
Iran executed at least 691 people in the first ten months of 2026, including 36 protesters, according to Norway-based Iran Human Rights, which recorded at least 77 executions in October alone.
No one was calling for US troops on the ground, Zakheim said, but Washington must be ready to strike again if Tehran rebuilds its nuclear or ballistic missile programs.
“After Midnight Hammer and Epic Fury, I felt it was the beginning of the end of this regime, and I still stand by that,” he said.
Democrats won control of both chambers of Congress in the November 3 midterm elections, with anger over the war’s part in pushing up the cost of living helping drive the result, according to Reuters. They also plan to cut Trump’s $1.5 trillion defense budget request, Military.com reported. Zakheim said the president was right to seek it.
The Constitution gives the president, as commander in chief, authority over military and foreign affairs that Congress does not share, Zakheim said, and presidents often turn to foreign policy after midterm losses “because it’s the one thing they can control.” Congress holds the power to declare war and to fund the military.
He warned against a “new generation of détente advocates” and what he called “full-on declinists,” some of whom won seats in the midterms.
“They believe that if only America would retreat from the world and leave, the Iranians would be just fine,” he said. “There’s no evidence of that in the history since 1979.”
He traced Washington’s experience with the Islamic Republic to the 444-day hostage crisis, which ended as Reagan was sworn in in January 1981, and the 1983 bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beirut, which he described as America’s first encounter with Hezbollah.
“You don’t have to look far back to find the number of times this regime has murdered Americans,” he said
Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi accused the Islamic Republic on Friday of funding threats against journalists abroad while failing to provide for people at home, after two Iranian men were convicted in London of assisting Iranian intelligence operations.
“The Islamic Republic keeps careful accounts. It has a budget for killing journalists, but not for people’s bread,” Ebadi, a lawyer who has lived in exile since 2009, wrote on her Telegram channel.
She shared an audio recording of Mostafa Sepahvand, one of two men convicted on Thursday at London’s Woolwich Crown Court of helping Iranian intelligence target Iran International journalists.
In it, Sepahvand complains about his travel and car-hire costs, the risk of arrest and the work of tracking down where journalists lived. He says he was sent only £3,500, about $4,600, though he had spent up to £8,000, about $10,600.
British prosecutors said he had been promised £150,000, about $200,000, and help resolving a criminal case against him in Iran, to “finish off” one of his targets.
“Even following journalists through the streets of London has a price,” Ebadi wrote. “The agent has to be paid, his car and travel covered, and if he is supposed to kill someone, the fee has to match the risk.”
In Iran, she wrote, there are families who cannot afford meat or medicine, workers who wait months for their wages and prisoners who cannot buy “even a packet of biscuits.” Yet the state had offered £150,000 to locate and eliminate a journalist working thousands of kilometers away.
“A government that won’t give workers what they are owed sets a fee for killing journalists, and apparently can’t even pay that on time,” she wrote. “In the Islamic Republic, even the lives of its opponents have a price. Only the lives of the Iranian people are worth nothing in its accounts.”
Sepahvand, 41, and Farhad Javadi Manesh, 46, were unanimously convicted of conduct likely to assist a foreign intelligence service under Britain’s National Security Act. Sepahvand was also convicted of surveillance and reconnaissance with intent to commit serious violence. They will be sentenced on December 17.
Prosecutors said the men watched Iran International journalists and others in Britain on behalf of Iranian intelligence. Tehran has denied involvement in plots against its critics abroad.
Exiled Iranian journalists remain at risk despite the conviction of two men in London for targeting Iran International staff on behalf of Iranian intelligence, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists warned on Friday.
Mostafa Sepahvand, 41, and Farhad Javadi Manesh, 46, were found guilty on Thursday at London’s Woolwich Crown Court of assisting a foreign intelligence service.
Sepahvand was also convicted of conducting surveillance and reconnaissance with intent to commit serious violence against a person in Britain. Javadi Manesh was acquitted of a separate charge of surveillance intended to help others commit serious violence, and a third defendant, Shapoor Qalehali Khani Noori, 57, was acquitted of all charges. The two men will be sentenced on December 17.
“The Woolwich trial has ended, but today’s verdicts don’t make the lives of our journalists any safer so long as the Islamic Republic of Iran continues its campaign of death threats and violence against them,” Iran International spokesman Adam Baillie said.
“Kambiz Hosseini and Mojtaba Pourmohsen and others remain under threat. We are thankful for the continued vigilance of the British police in protecting not only us but the many other Iranians targeted by Iran,” he said.
“Iran will no doubt continue its use of agents and proxies abroad in its campaign to terrorize its critics.”
CPJ calls for those behind operation to face justice
The six-week trial showed that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards had tasked the defendants with monitoring targets including the Iran International journalists Hosseini and Pourmohsen, a lawyer and a media production professional, CPJ said.
“The shocking evidence presented in this trial once again shows the lengths Iran is prepared to go to in order to silence journalists, wherever they are in the world,” said Fiona O’Brien, CPJ’s regional director for Europe and Central Asia.
“While it’s encouraging to see the perpetrators of crimes against them being held accountable, those who paid and instructed them must also be brought to justice,” she said.
Videos, photographs and messages showed Sepahvand watching his targets’ homes and workplaces while coordinating with contacts in Iran, according to Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service.
The men had been promised large payments for information, prosecutors said. In one message, Sepahvand asked for £150,000, about $200,000, to “finish [the target] off” once he had found them.
“This was a calculated operation to spy on those critical of the Iranian regime,” said Frank Ferguson, head of the CPS Special Crime and Counter Terrorism Division.
Sepahvand had shown he was willing to go beyond surveillance to serious violence, Ferguson said, but the men were stopped before any attack.
Convictions follow series of attacks on Iranian journalists
CPJ said the convictions followed several other cases of threats and attacks against Iran International journalists in Britain.
Earlier this year, two Romanian men were sentenced to 12 and eight years in prison for their part in the 2024 stabbing of Iran International presenter Pouria Zeraati outside his London home.
A Greek national has been charged with surveilling an Iran International journalist, and court proceedings over an arson attack on the broadcaster’s premises are under way.
Exiled Iranian journalists continue to face physical threats, online harassment and intimidation of their families in Iran, CPJ said.
Tehran has denied targeting journalists working for Iran International and BBC Persian.
France is investigating a cyberattack on freezers that store blood for hospital patients, its national blood service told Iran International, weeks after Paris blamed Iran’s Revolutionary Guards for hacking the freezers of hundreds of French supermarkets.
The service, the Établissement français du sang (EFS), said in a written reply that a judicial investigation was under way and that it could not comment on it or give details.
The attack took place on the night of November 1 to 2. Hackers took over the control systems of cold rooms at three regional centers and changed their temperature and defrost settings, the EFS said earlier.
Some units were reset from about minus 30 degrees Celsius to 110 degrees, the French weekly Le Canard enchaîné reported. That was the setting, not the temperature the blood products reached.
Alarms and an on-call technician caught the problem, and the products were moved to other sites or otherwise secured, the EFS said. No samples or blood products were lost. The service has not said when the attack was detected, how long the transfer took, or how the stocks were moved.
The attack came the same night that supermarkets in at least nine European countries, including Belgium and Luxembourg, reported suspected cyberattacks that sent fridge and freezer temperatures soaring.
The Paris prosecutor’s office has not yet linked the attack on the blood service to the supermarket cases and said its investigation is continuing, Agence France-Presse reported.
On October 11 and 12, hackers took control of refrigeration systems at about 700 supermarkets and other businesses across France, letting fridges and freezers warm up. Some stores had to throw out their entire stock of fresh and frozen food, and officials said the attacks caused heavy losses and, at some sites, fires.
A joint report by French intelligence and cybersecurity agencies named Shahid Kaveh, an offensive cyber unit of the Revolutionary Guards, as responsible, and said it worked behind front groups posing as independent hacker collectives. Paris prosecutors have requested international arrest warrants for suspects.
Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot summoned Iran’s ambassador and said France would seek European Union sanctions against those responsible. France was weighing further measures, he said, including some it might never make public.