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Iran
Focus
 Paris,
Apr. 08 – A Swiss judge has issued an international arrest warrant for the
former head of Iran’s
notorious secret police for his role in the assassination of a prominent
Iranian dissident.
The warrant was issued to law enforcement agencies for the arrest of Hojjatoleslam Ali Fallahian,
who for years headed Iran’s
Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS). Fallahian
was charged with masterminding the assassination of Prof. Kazem
Rajavi, a renowned human rights advocate and elder
brother of Iranian opposition leader Massoud Rajavi.
Kazem Rajavi, then the
representative of the opposition National Council of Resistance of Iran
(NCRI) in Switzerland, was
gunned down in broad daylight by several MOIS agents on April 24, 1990 as he
was driving to his home in Coppet, a village near Geneva.
A statement released by the NCRI on Saturday said that the warrant issued by
Swiss Investigative Magistrate Jacques Antenen
called on law enforcement agencies to arrest “Ali Fallahian,
former Minister of Intelligence and Security of the Islamic Republic of Iran
and transfer him to the Canton Vaud Prison in
Lausanne, Switzerland”.
The Swiss judge’s ruling added that prior to the assassination of Kazem Rajavi, Fallahian had also ordered the assassination of Massoud Rajavi.
The NCRI charged that Iran’s
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and former
President Ayatollah Ali Akbar
Hashemi Rafsanjani were also “directly involved” in ordering the
assassination and should be issued international arrest warrants as well.
“13 persons were involved in planning and carrying out the murder. All of
them had service passports, marked ’on assignment.’ A number of those
documents had been issued on the same day in Tehran”, Judge Antenen
announced.
He added that the MOIS had close ties with Iran’s
Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), particularly the Qods (Jerusalem)
Force, and “Minister Fallahian was responsible for
assassinations and issuing the orders for all such missions”.
Kazem Rajavi was Iran's first Ambassador to the United Nations
headquarters in Geneva
following the 1979 Islamic revolution. Shortly after his appointment, he
resigned his post in protest to the “repressive policies and terrorist
activities of the ruling clerics in Iran”.
He then intensified his campaign against mass executions, arbitrary arrests,
and torture carried out by Iran’s
theocratic leadership.
At the age of 56, he held six doctorate degrees in the fields of law,
political science, and sociology from the universities of Paris
and Geneva.
Two of the hitmen were later discovered in France and
arrested by French police. Despite a warrant for their arrest by the
authorities in Switzerland,
the French government boarded them on a direct flight to Tehran. The French action drew
international condemnation including from the United States Department of
State.
Fallahian, who is currently an advisor on security
affairs to Supreme Leader Khamenei and a member of
the Assembly of Experts, is believed to have plotted other high-profile
terrorist strikes and assassination of Iranian dissidents elsewhere in Europe
and the Middle East.
In 1997, a court in Berlin implicated Fallahian, Khamenei,
Rafsanjani, and then-Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati in masterminding the 1992
killing of four Kurdish dissidents in a restaurant called the Mykonos.
Iranian exiles charge that the MOIS continues to have a heavy presence in Europe and has stepped up intelligence gathering
operations against Iranian dissidents since hard-liner Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad took office as President.
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