The handlers in Tehran sent briefing files so thorough that they listed the colour of a target’s car and the names of family pets. On Thursday, a jury at Woolwich Crown Court in south-east London decided that the two men who acted on those files were working for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Sepahvand, 41, and his co-defendant Manesh, 46, now stand convicted of aiding the Guards, an offence created by legislation passed in 2023. Over roughly eight months from August 2024, they watched homes and offices linked to two journalists at Iran International, a Persian-language channel loathed by the Iranian government, plus someone working in TV production and the boss of the campaign group UK Lawyers for Israel.
Sepahvand was the organiser, prosecutors said, passing tasks to Manesh and staying in touch with numbers in Iran tied to the Guards. The jury also found he intended his reconnaissance to lead to serious violence. In voice notes he spoke of a £150,000 payment and of “finishing off” one target, and he expected a theft conviction back home to be quietly erased. His defence was that he had been coerced into it. Manesh, who said he had only been house hunting, was cleared of the violence charge, while a third defendant, 57, was acquitted outright.
Counter-terrorism officers combed through 534 gigabytes of material, much of it in Farsi. Jurors also heard that Sepahvand had used an AI chatbot to try to locate people, which reporters described as the first time such search history had featured in a British state-threat trial.
The case comes four months after London declared the Guards a threat to national security, so that aiding them can now cost up to 14 years behind bars. Tehran rejects every allegation. Sentences for both men are due at the Central Criminal Court a week before Christmas, on 17 December.
