A British man has been arrested on suspicion of spying on a UK military base in Cyprus on behalf of the Iranian military.<\/p>\n
Rashad Sultanov, 44, of Islington, north London, is accused of carrying out “hostile surveillance” on RAF Akrotiri and sharing information with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.<\/p>\n
Sultanov, who also holds Azerbaijani citizenship, was arrested by Cypriot police on 17 July and is in custody pending extradition proceedings.<\/p>\n
The Crown Prosecution Service has said he will be charged under the National Security Act – the first time an alleged offence under the 2023 law has been investigated in an overseas territory.<\/p>\n
The UK has maintained a permanent base at Akrotiri since the 1950s and RAF operations to shoot down Iranian missiles and drones have been launched from there in recent months.<\/p>\n
The investigation, which was led by Counter Terrorism Policing (CTP) London, focused on alleged spying between 11 May 2025 and 22 June 2025.<\/p>\n
Commander Helen Flanagan, head of CTP London, said: “This case shows we are able to use the National Security Act overseas when British military bases are allegedly targeted by hostile state activity.<\/p>\n
“A huge amount of partnership work has been carried out between British and Cypriot law enforcement agencies.<\/p>\n
“We continue to work with colleagues from the CPS, National Crime Agency and Cypriot authorities as extradition proceedings progress.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A British man has been arrested on suspicion of spying on a UK military base in Cyprus on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":720559,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-720558","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/720558","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=720558"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/720558\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/720559"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=720558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=720558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=720558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}