Woolwich Jury Convicts Two Iranians of Hunting Iran International Journalists

A National Security Act verdict confirms Tehran's reliance on locally recruited surveillance teams against dissident media in London.

Intelligence Lead

A jury at Woolwich Crown Court has convicted two Iranian men of assisting a foreign intelligence service after they surveilled journalists at Iran International and a London lawyer on behalf of the Iranian state. The verdict, delivered on 12 November, is the clearest judicial confirmation to date that Tehran is running paid, locally sourced reconnaissance cells against its critics in Britain. A third defendant was acquitted on all counts.

Situation Report

Mostafa Sepahvand, 41, and Farhad Javadi Manesh, 46, were found guilty of conduct likely to assist a foreign intelligence service under the National Security Act. Shapoor Qalehali Khani Noori, 57, was cleared. All three are Iranian-born and were living in London when arrested; Noori was detained in May 2025, according to evidence reported by Iran International during the trial.

Prosecutors said the group carried out surveillance between August 2024 and February 2025 against Iran International presenters Kambiz Hosseini and Mojtaba Pourmohsen, and against Jonathan Turner, a founder member of UK Lawyers for Israel. The defendants visited addresses linked to the targets, filmed and photographed them, and used open-source tools, including ChatGPT, to research them. Mobile network data placed the defendants at Hosseini's address. Material put before the jury also included overhead imagery and a vehicle description reportedly supplied by handlers.

The prosecution alleged that Sepahvand had been earmarked to carry out an attack and had been promised £150,000. A voice note read to the court recorded him describing the work as "evil business". He told the jury he acted under threats against himself and his family. Frank Ferguson of the Crown Prosecution Service's special crime and counter-terrorism division called it "a calculated operation to spy on those critical of the Iranian regime", adding that the defendants were stopped before any attack took place.

Sentencing dates have not yet been reported. Tehran has not commented on the verdict; it has consistently denied directing operations against Iran International, which it has designated a terrorist organisation.

Background & Context

Iran International has been the most persistently targeted foreign-language outlet in Britain since 2022. Its presenter Pouria Zeraati was stabbed outside his Wimbledon home in March 2024; two Romanian men were convicted in June 2026 of that attack, which prosecutors attributed to Tehran. In December 2024 an Austrian national, Magomed-Husejn Dovtaev, was convicted of reconnaissance on the channel's former Chiswick premises. A teenager has separately pleaded guilty over an arson attack on its London offices.

The Woolwich case sits inside a wider pattern. Earlier this week the US Justice Department unsealed a superseding indictment alleging that an Iranian-Iraqi operative directed a planned vehicle-borne attack on RAF Fairford and a network linked to roughly 18 attacks or attempts in Europe since March. France has publicly attributed sabotage of supermarket refrigeration systems to an IRGC cyber unit. The common thread is deniable labour: criminals, diaspora residents and paid intermediaries tasked remotely, with Iranian officers kept off the ground.

Analysis & Assessment

The conviction matters less for the individuals than for the evidential precedent. It is assessed that this is among the first jury verdicts under the National Security Act's foreign intelligence assistance offence to involve Iranian tasking against journalists, establishing that surveillance alone, without an attack, is prosecutable where the intelligence link can be proven. That lowers the threshold at which British counterintelligence can intervene, and it will shape how the Metropolitan Police Counter Terrorism Command and MI5 time future disruptions.

The acquittal of Noori also carries a signal. Jurors appear to have distinguished between defendants whose knowledge of the Iranian end-user was proven and one whose was not. Tehran's model depends on exactly that ambiguity; operatives who can plausibly claim they were filming houses for a stranger present a harder prosecution. Further cases are likely to turn on message metadata and payment trails rather than the surveillance itself.

Politically, the verdict increases pressure on the government to move Iran onto the enhanced tier of the Foreign Influence Registration Scheme and to revisit IRGC proscription. With the Fairford indictment, the arrest of a US officer at Imjin Barracks and the active Gulf confrontation, the UK is likely to face a sustained period in which Iranian hostile-state activity is treated as a top-tier domestic threat alongside Russia.