British courts on Tuesday opened the trial for three men accused of spying for Iran and threatening to harm London-based journalists.

Woolwich Crown Court stands in London. Three men are on trial there for allegedly spying on and planning to attack London-based journalists. File Photo by Andy Rain/EPA UPI

Oct. 6 (UPI) -- British courts on Tuesday opened the trial for three men accused of spying for Iran and threatening to harm London-based journalists.

The prosecutor in the Woolwich Crown Court said that Mostafa Sepahvand, 41, had planned to carry out the attack, and Farhad Manesh, 46, and Shapoor Nori, 57, would provide surveillance. All three are Iranian but were living in London.

Sepahvand, of St. John's Wood doesn't deny he was involved, but said he did it out of fear of retaliation if he refused.

The prosecution said it's "an entirely bogus claim" and that his motives were money and the removal of a criminal conviction for theft in Iran.

Prosecutor Bill Emlyn Jones said the three were targeting journalists working for Iran International, a Persian-language satellite channel based in London that is critical of the Iranian leadership. Tehran has declared Iran International a terrorist organization.

At least two of the channel's journalists were targeted, and one was supposed to be "subjected to serious violence" as part of the retribution. The attack would also be "to try to silence and deter others who might dare to voice their criticism"

The men face charges of assisting a foreign intelligence service under the National Security Act.

"The evidence we will call illustrates that these three defendants carried out surveillance and reconnaissance, visiting addresses linked to their targets, taking photos, taking videos, doing online research about them," the BBC reported Jones said. "The defendants were engaged in what is very obviously a form of spying."

The defendants also allegedly had a briefing sheet on lawyer Jonathan Turner, a founding member of U.K. Lawyers for Israel.

The two journalists targeted by the three men were Mojtaba Pourmohsen and Kambiz Hosseini.

Sepahvand's cell phone had a document with images of Pourmohsen at his workplace and a hotel where he had lived. Noori had photos of the block of apartments where Pourmohsen lived in Brentford in December 2024,

The men knew the color of Hosseini's car and the name of his dog.

"You can imagine the fear and psychological impact caused to him by discovering that all of those details about him, including the name of his dog, were known to the intelligence services," Jones said.

The prosecution said Sepahvand was to be paid more than $199,000 to find a target and to "finish them off."

"None of this was particularly high-tech; none of this was very sophisticated," Sky News reported Jones said. "But it served a simple purpose: to gather enough information about their targets, so that those targets could be made to suffer the consequences of daring to criticise the Iranian regime."

The three men deny all charges. Noori is from Ealing, and Manesh is from Brent, both in the west of London. The two don't deny the surveillance but claim they didn't know they were doing it for the Iranian intelligence services.

All three were allowed to stay in Britain after claiming asylum. They arrived between 2016 and 2022.

The trial is expected to last up to six weeks.