Israeli Woman Accused Of Spying For Iran Attempts Suicide
A Jewish Israeli woman who is accused of spying for Iran has attempted suicide and is now hospitalized in critical condition.
A Jewish Israeli woman who is accused of spying for Iran has attempted suicide and is now hospitalized in critical condition.
The woman, who was arrested for spying for Iran in December, attempted to take her own life while under house arrest at her home in Holon on Thursday, Hebrew media reported. Paramedics arrived at her home and found that she had tried to overdose on pills.
The Shin Bet security service said in January that five Jewish Israelis had been detained on charges of assisting an Iranian operative in gathering intelligence and making connections in Israel. The operative, going by the name of Rambod Namdar, maintained profiles on social media sites and pretended to be Jewish. What could be more worrying for the Israeli authorities is that some of the suspects seem to have known or suspected that Namdar was an Iranian operative, but agreed to cooperate for small sums of money, ranging from $900 to $5,000, a Shin Bet official said at the time.
Two of the suspects -- all of Iranian heritage -- include the woman from Holon and her husband, whose names are barred from publication. The wife, who worked as a presenter at a radio station, was in contact with Namdar and passed along photos of government offices over the course of several years, while her husband was accused of being aware of the connection, speaking with the Iranian operative himself, as well as transporting her to the US Consulate to photograph it.
The husband denied the accusations during an interview with Channel 12 news on Thursday evening following his wife’s suicide attempt, and accused the Shin Bet of extracting a false confession from her, saying, “For the past eight months, our life has turned into hell.”
Rushdie, 75, was in 1989 the subject of a death sentence in an edict issued by Ruhollah Khomeini, then leader of Iran. In 2012, it was widely reported that the 15 Khordad Foundation, a quasi-official religious body in Iran, had increased an existing bounty offered for killing Rushdie from $2.8 million to $3.3 million.
Witnesses, including a reporter for Associated Press, reported that the attack on Rushdie, just as the author was about to begin a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution, lasted around 20 seconds. Police reported that a state trooper at the event took the attacker into custody as others held up Rushdie’s legs, presumably to maintain blood flow to the chest.
The New York Times reported that Rita Landman, an endocrinologist also in the audience, said Rushdie had multiple stab wounds, including one to the right side of his neck, and that there was a pool of blood under his body.
‘He has a pulse…’
She said he was still alive, however, with people saying “He has a pulse, he has a pulse he has a pulse.”
Nothing has yet emerged about the attacker or his motivation.
While Iran’s reformist president Mohammad Khatami in 1998 assured Britain the Iranian authorities would “neither hinder nor assist assassination operations on Rushdie,” Ali Khamenei, leader after Khomeini’s death in 1989, has several times said the edit, or ‘fatwa,’ was still in place.
In 2019 Twitter deleted a message on Khamenei’s account reiterating this.
Suzanne Nossel, head of PEN America, of which Rushdie is a former president, said she could think of “no comparable incident of a public violent attack on a literary writer on American soil.”
‘Full accountability’
Chuck Schumer, who represents New York state and leads Senate Democrats, said the “attack on freedom of speech” was “shocking and appalling” and called for “full accountability and justice.”
The attack on Rushdie comes two days after the US Justice Department announced charges against an alleged Iranian Revolutionary Guard over a plan to kill John Bolton, the former national security adviser.
Mohsen Khojasteh-Mehr, who also serves as the head of National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC), told Fars news agency that converting the memoranda of understanding (MoUs), sealed between NIOC and Russian Gazprom cover various fields, including petroleum and gas swaps.
Iran and Russia in July agreed to $40 billion in trade and investment projects.
A swap means that Iran would import gas from Russia and deliver a certain quantity to another country that has a gas purchase deal with Moscow if it makes sense geographically or in terms of available infrastructure. In this case, among Iran’s neighbors only Turkey has a gas deal with Russia, but it has its own pipelines, much shorter in distance than a 2,000-kilometer longer route from Iran.
Buying Russian gas to cover shortages
This makes the Iranian claim of a gas swap strange. What appears to be more likely is Iran buying Russian gas to cover its own production shortages.
Russia, in turn, which has been buying gas from Central Asian countries as a middleman and exporting it, has a shrinking market after sanctions following its invasion of Ukraine. Existing pipelines that send the cheap gas from Central Asia to Russia can now be reversed and pump it to Iran.
Last year, Russia imported 10.5 billion cubic meters (bcm) of Turkmen and 4.6 bcm of Kazakh gas through these pipelines, according to BP statistics.
There are also two pipelines, connecting Turkmenistan to Iran's northeastern regions with 20 bcm/yr capacity together. Currently Turkmenistan delivers only 1.5 bcm/yr of its gas via these routes.
Fars news agency says Iran can import 20 bcm/yr of Russian gas for both domestic consumption and delivery to Iraq and Turkey.
It seems the first variant is feasible, because Iran had 250 mcm/d gas deficit last winter (equal to Turkey's total daily gas demand in 2021) and every year the gap between its gas production and demand is growing.
Fars says Iran has consumed 9 billion liters of diesel and 6 billion liters of mazut in electricity generation last year, due to gas shortage. Iran can consume Russian gas in power plants to be able to export more diesel and mazut, making more profit, if the Russian gas is below regional prices.
Russia helping Iran in gas production?
Fars reported that another important MoU between NIOC and Gazprom is related to pressure enhancement of South Pars gas field in the Persian Gulf, shared between Iran and Qatar.
In the absence of Western technology, Iran has been unable to keep up production at the field, steadily losing out as its domestic consumption has increased.
Fars said if the sides finalize the MoU and sign an agreement, the contract value would be $10bn.
According to the NIOC, the Iranian section of South Pars gas field would pass the half-mark point of its life by 2023 and every year its production would decline 10 bcm. Iran and a consortium headed by French Total signed a $5-bn contract in 2016 to develop the South Pars, including the installation of a 20,000-ton platform with two giant compressors to prevent production decline.
Iran needs at least 10 to 15 such giant platforms (15 times bigger than the current active platforms) in South Pars. Each new platform costs $2.5 billion.
It is not clear how Gazprom would enhance the pressure of the gas field as only large Western energy companies can build the giant platforms with huge compressors.
When Total left the South Pars contract due to US sanctions, Chinese CNPC also abandoned the project due to its inability to build larger platforms. Gazprom also has no experience or the technology for such a project in the sea.
Qatar installed huge platforms, through contracts with Western companies, especially Total, and not only prevented a decline in production, but it has started new drillings to increase gas output by 30% in the next five years.
Regarding Iran's inability to prevent production decline from South Pars - a field that accounts for 70% of Iran's total gas output- it seems the country eyes Russian imports to compensate for the decline in South Pars and prevent further gas shortages in cold seasons.
According to a document obtained by Iran International, the Swiss embassy in Tehran which represents US interests has officially informed the Iranian government of the lawsuit.
In June, Canada also announced that it has notified Iran of Ontario's Superior Court of Justice’s ruling that IRGC’s downing of Ukraine Airlines Flight PS752 was intentional.
In May 2021, some family members filed a civil lawsuit against Iran and senior officials they believe were to blame for the incident. Canada’s Ontario Court ruled that the downing of the plane was an intentional act of terrorism and on December 31, 2021, awarded compensation to be shared by the estates of the six victims.
In June, Canada's international human rights parliamentary subcommittee criticized the government's “passive” approach toward Iran’s widespread human rights abuses in a House of Commons subcommittee meeting attended by several political and human rights activists – including the spokesman of the Association of Victims' Families, Hamed Esmaeilion.
The airliner was shot down by two air-defense missiles fired by the IRGC on January 8, 2020, as it took off from Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport. All 176 passengers and crew, including 63 Canadians and 10 from Sweden, as well as 82 Iranian citizens on the plane died in the disaster.
