TEHRAN -- -Iran said its security forces had arrested a network of agents working for the occupying regime of Israel before they were able to carry out sabotage and “terrorist operations”.
“This network’s members were in contact with Mossad spy agency through a neighboring country and entered Iran from (Iraq’s) Kurdistan region with advanced equipment and strong explosives,” the ministry said in a statement.
The network planned “acts of sabotage and unprecedented terrorist operations in sensitive locations”, its statement said, without giving details.
Earlier this month, U.S. President Joe Biden and Zionist PM Yair Lapid signed a joint pledge to confront Iran.
On Sunday, Nournews, an outlet affiliated with Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, said the captured group was on its way to blow up an unspecified “sensitive centre” in Isfahan, which among other things houses the country’s main nuclear facilities.
The Natanz nuclear facilities in Isfahan were targeted by two major sabotage attacks in 2020 and 2021, which Iran condemned as “nuclear terrorism”.
“The blow to this network was realized as a result of one of the most complicated operations of Iran’s intelligence apparatus inside or outside the country,” the outlet said.
According to Nournews, the group had trained in an unnamed African country for months, where its members simulated the operation, and then entered Iran.
They had already planted high-impact explosives and were only hours away from carrying out the final operation when they were arrested, it said.
Security forces were monitoring the spy team even before it arrived in Iran and all its members and contacts both inside and outside the country were identified by the intelligence ministry several months before they entered the country.
Iranian officials announced last month that three people arrested in April on suspicion of working with Mossad had planned to assassinate some Iranian nuclear scientists.
Iran blamed the assassination of an Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) colonel, Hassan Sayyad Khodaei, in downtown Tehran in May on the occupying regime of Israel, vowing to take revenge.