The 17-minute programme purports to show 46-year-old Ahmadreza Djalali admitting he spied on Iran’s nuclear programme for Israel.

Mr Djalali, an emergency medicine specialist, was sentenced to death on the charges in October.

In October, a court in Iran sentenced Mr Djalali to death for spying – a charge that he and his wife previously consistently denied.

Five days ago, human rights group Amnesty International said the Iranian Supreme Court had upheld the sentence “through a secret and hasty process and without allowing any defence submission”, despite repeated enquiries by his lawyers.

It said Mr Djalali had said in a letter from jail that he was being held in reprisal for refusing to use his connections in Europe to spy for Iran.

He was arrested in April 2016 while on a business trip to Iran. Amnesty says he was held without access to a lawyer for seven months, three of which were in solitary confinement.

While in solitary confinement, Mr Djalali has previously said, he was twice forced to make confessions in front of a video camera by reading out statements written by his interrogators.

He says he was put under intense pressure, through psychological torture and threats to execute him and arrest his children, to “confess” to being a spy for a “hostile government”. But he said such claims were fabricated.

Iran is known to have broadcast forced confessions in the past.

Source » bbc