28-year-old Amir Mizra Hekmati, one developer of the infamous Kuma/War series, has been sentenced to death in Iran.
The local authorities claim that he had accepted and confessed to receiving CIA money to produce the free-to-play Kuma/War series, which recreates real-life military conflicts, like "Assault on Iran" which re-enacts the what-if scenario of the US military attacking Iran to disarm it of nuclear arms. Iran's Revolutionary Court has found Hekmati guilty of being "Corrupt on Earth and Mohareb", an offense punishable by death, for supposedly spreading US propaganda in Iran.
Developer Kuma has acknowledged that they have received language-learning software from the US army, and Hekmati was a former US Marine, served in Iraq as an Arabic language translator, and did receive espionage training. No evidence, however, has surfaced apart from his confession, of which he could have been forced into. National Security Council's Tommy Vietor has told the New York Times that this is a likely scenario:
The Iranian regime has a history of falsely accusing people of being spies, of eliciting forced confessions, and of holding innocent Americans for political reasons.
Hekamti's parents, on a support website, claim: "His very life is being exploited for political gain." This comes in the face of rising Iran-U.S. tensions over Iran's nuclear program.
