February 26, 2021
The Pasdaran tried to use a jailed Australian woman to lure her Israeli husband to Tehran, the Australian Herald Sun has reported.
The discovery that Kylie Moore-Gilbert had an Israeli husband is thought to have led Iranian authorities to arrest her at Tehran’s airport as she prepared to leave the country in 2018 after attending an academic conference. Authorities later sentenced her to 10 years in prison for espionage.
Since being freed last December and returned to Australia, the woman has reportedly discovered that her husband was having an affair with a colleague of hers. Moore-Gilbert is now seeking a divorce.
In a letter from Moore-Gilbert to the Australian prime minister, smuggled out of Evin prison in Iran in late 2019, the imprisoned academic reported that the Pasdaran had attempted to set a trap for her Russian-Israeli husband, Ruslan Hodorov, the Herald Sun reported February 7.
“The Revolutionary Guard have imprisoned me in these terrible conditions for over nine months in order to extort me both personally and my government,” Moore-Gilbert wrote Prime Minister Scott Morrison.
“They have also attempted to use me as a hostage in a diabolical plot to lure my husband, an Australian permanent resident, into joining me in an Iranian prison,” she wrote.
At the time of her arrest, Iranian media variously reported that Moore-Gilbert’s father was Jewish, that she had converted to Judaism in the UK in 2007, and that she had visited Israel many times since, Channel 12 has said.
The Iranian reports claimed, without evidence, that she had learned Hebrew and connected with an employee of the Shin Bet internal security service while in Israel. The Iranian reports have not been corroborated.
Moore-Gilbert was released after 804 days behind bars in exchange for three Iranians who were jailed in Thailand for setting up a bombing campaign that went awry when a bomb they were making blew up in the house they had rented.
Fairfax Media, a major Australian news outlet, has reported that the Australian government played a crucial behind-the-scenes role in bringing Thailand to the table and engineering the prisoner swap.
Fairfax cited unidentified Australian government sources as saying the negotiations took more than six months.
In Bangkok, Thai officials said they transferred three Iranians involved in the botched 2012 bomb plot back to Tehran. While they declined to call it a swap and Iran referred to the men as “economic activists,” Moore-Gilbert flew out of Tehran just as the three accused bombers flew into Tehran to a hero’s welcome.
