Iran

Russia will launch two Iranian satellites into orbit using a Soyuz launcher on Tuesday, Iran's ambassador to Moscow said Monday, as the two U.S.-sanctioned countries deepen their scientific relationship.

"In continuation of the development of Iran-Russia scientific and technological cooperation, two Iranian satellites, Kowsar and Hodhod, will be launched to a 500 km orbit of Earth," Iranian Ambassador to Russia Kazem Jalali said in a post on X.

The development of Kowsar, a high-resolution imaging satellite, and Hodhod, a small communications satellite, is the first substantial effort by Iran's private space sector, a report by Iran's semiofficial news agency Tasnim said last month.

Russia launched an Iranian research-sensing satellite, Pars 1, into space in February using a Soyuz rocket from the Vostochny Cosmodrome.

Iran on Monday executed a Jewish citizen convicted of murdering another man in 2022 following a personal dispute, reports said. It was a rare case of an execution of member of a religious minority in the predominately Muslim nation.

Mizanonline.ir, a website affiliated with Iran's judiciary, said 23-year-old Arvin Ghahremani was put to death after the country's Supreme Court affirmed the capital punishment handed down in the case earlier last year.

The report quoted Hamid Reza Karimi, the prosecutor of the western city of Kermanshah, as saying the court and the convicted man's lawyers and relatives had failed to convince the victim's family to abstain from qisas — an act under Islamic penal code that calls for similar punishment, or an "eye for an eye" — and effectively pardon his killer.

The victim's name was not provided.

According to the report, Ghahramani attacked the victim outside a gym in Kermanshah in 2022 and stabbed the man several times following a dispute over money he had loaned the victim.

Jewish citizens are a small minority in the country of 85 million. In 1999, Iran arrested 13 Jewish citizens, accusing them of spying for Israel and sentenced several to up to four years in prison.

Many Jews fled the country after the 1979 Islamic Revolution and current estimates suggest some 20,000 Jews remain in Iran. Shiite Muslims make up most of Iran's population and the establishment is led by hard-line clerics who preach a strict version of Islam.