Couple from Lod arrested as Iranian spies

This is the fourth espionage case cracked over the last few months by the Israeli security authorities.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

An Israeli couple from Lod have been arrested for allegedly spying for Iran for the last three years, the police and Shabak announced Thursday.

The authorities said that Rafael and Lala Guliyev had gathered intelligence on and photographed such sensitive installations as Mossad headquarters.

The couple, in their early thirties, also allegedly collected information on a female employee of the Institute for National Security Studies think tank, which studies terrorism and conflicts in the Middle East. Tehran had her “marked for harm,” they said.

Rafael Guliyev also revealed to his interrogators that he had been asked to find a hit-man for his handler, a 56-year-old Azeri man named Alhan Agayev.

A senior Shabak official pointed out that this was not the first Iranian attempt to recruit spies “in order to promote espionage and terrorist activity in Israel.”

“These incidents join a series of foiled plots that have been revealed in recent weeks, in which Israeli citizens were arrested who were employed by Iranian intelligence agents and carried out missions on their behalf,” the official said.

Three other spy cases have been brought to light recently as the war with Tehran terror proxies Hamas and Hezbollah continues into its second year.

Also on Thursday, the Tel Aviv District Court indicted Bnei Brak resident Asher Benjamin Weiss for allegedly taking videos of the home and car of an Israeli nuclear scientist on orders from Tehran, and sending them to an eastern Jerusalem resident to enable him to assassinate the man and his family.

He was charged with contact with a foreign agent, providing intelligence to an enemy and obstruction of justice.

When the police were tipped off in September about the plot, the incipient attacker was arrested along with six other men, aged 19-23, all from the Beit Safafa neighborhood of the capital. Their indictments include aiding the enemy during wartime and providing intelligence to an enemy.

In September, the Shabak announced that it had arrested a 73-year-old Israeli businessman who had allegedly agreed to carry out a high-profile murder of a leading Israeli figure, possibly even the prime minister, in an act of retaliation for the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in the Iranian capital, which greatly embarrassed the mullahs.

Ten days ago, a publication ban was lifted on a case in which seven Jews from northern Israel allegedly gathered intelligence on Israeli air force bases, the IDF’s military headquarters in Tel Aviv, and Iron Dome defense systems.

Like the Guliyevs, the work of the ring, which included an AWOL soldier and two minors, predated the current war, this time by a year.

The authorities have not yet said whether their motivation was solely monetary, as they were paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for their espionage work, but the fact that they continued throughout the war made their actions especially “severe,” said the prosecutors.

The police statement on the Guliyev capture noted that the security services are “working night and day to locate and foil activity against the state’s citizens, and will act with a harsh and intolerant hand against those unscrupulous criminals who collaborate with the enemy and endanger the public and the country.”

EspionageIranIsrael PoliceIsraeli spyShabak