Iran’s justice system has executed a man convicted of a drone attack on a defense ministry facility in central Iran last year that was allegedly linked to Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, state media reported Sunday.

This person was “planning to blow up a Defense Ministry laboratory complex in Isfahan, under the guidance of a Mossad agent,” state television reported.

Neither when he was executed nor the identity of the “terrorist”, as state television described him, was made clear.

In February 2023, Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence announced that the “main” suspects in the drone attack had been arrested.

In January 2023, an air defense system destroyed a drone and two others were blown up during an attack on an Islamic Republic Ministry of Defense facility in Isfahan province.

According to the ministry, the night attack caused no casualties, only minor damage to the facility.

Although the authorities did not reveal what the activities were at the facility that was targeted, the official IRNA news agency said it was a “munitions factory”.

Iran and Israel have been waging an undeclared, secret war for years.

Israel accuses Iran – which it denies – of trying to acquire a nuclear arsenal and declares that it will prevent it by all means. Israel also seeks at all costs to reduce the influence of the Islamic Republic in the region.

Tehran, in turn, accuses Israel of being behind a series of sabotage and assassinations aimed at destroying the country’s nuclear energy program.

In August, Iran said it had thwarted a “highly sophisticated” plan, which it said was hatched by the Mossad, to sabotage Iran’s ballistic missile industry.

In January, the Iranian justice system announced the execution by hanging of four members of the Kurdish minority who it said were engaged in espionage for Israel.

The four men were arrested on July 23, 2022 and accused of carrying out an attack on a Ministry of Defense center in Isfahan, in other words the same case for which the fifth person was executed.

However, the Norway-based Hengaw, a human rights group in Iran, alleged that the four’s “confessions” were extracted under torture and underlined that their trial was anything but fair.

Although Tehran does not announce the number of executions, Hengaw estimates that 829 executions took place in Iran in 2023.

The country ranks second in the world in the number of executions, behind only China, according to estimates by NGOs, including Amnesty International.