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Associated Press
 GENEVA (AP) - A
Swiss investigator has issued an international arrest warrant for a former Iranian
minister for his alleged involvement in the slaying of an exiled Iranian
opposition leader, according to a copy of the request obtained Sunday by The
Associated Press.
The six-page document, partly reproduced earlier by the Lausanne-based weekly
Le Matin Dimanche,
requests Swiss federal authorities to demand the arrest of Ali Fallahian, Tehran's hard-line former intelligence
minister.
The warrant is dated March 20 and carries the signature of Jacques Antenen, an investigative magistrate in the Swiss canton
of Vaud. It is addressed to the Swiss Federal
Justice Ministry - which is responsible for transmitting the document
internationally - and requests Fallahian's arrest
on grounds that he "decided and ordered the execution of Kazem Rajavi," who was shot
to death near his suburban Geneva
home in 1990.
"We order all bailiffs and police forces to arrest and transfer the
following person to the canton of Vaud
prison," the warrant said. It then named Fallahian
and recounted the details of Rajavi's killing.
The ministry declined to say whether it received the warrant or had acted on
it. "We never confirm whether there is an international arrest warrant
or not, because searches under such a warrant are confidential,"
ministry spokesman Folco Galli
said.
Antenen, who has been in charge of the
investigation since 1997, could not be reached for comment Sunday.
Rajavi, a member of the Mujahedeen
Khalq armed resistance movement obtained political
asylum in Switzerland in
1973 and publicized human rights violations in Iran.
He was killed in the Lake Geneva town of Coppet, 11 kilometers (seven miles) east of Geneva, when his car
was sprayed by machine gun fire.
"Justice has been served," Stephane Rajavi, Kazem's son, told the
AP in a telephone interview.
"After 16 years of deadlock because of the refusal of the (Iranian)
state, we are at last here," he said, blaming Tehran for previously having thwarted the
Swiss investigation.
Dozens of dissidents and other Iranians, considered to be
enemies of Iran's
fundamentalist government, have been assassinated since the 1979 Islamic
revolution.
Iranian Intelligence Ministry agents are believed to have been behind the
slayings of a number of dissidents abroad during Fallahian's
tenure, from 1989 to 1997. By the ministry's own account, "rogue"
secret agents were behind the murders of five Iranian dissidents in 1998.
German authorities issued a warrant for Fallahian
in March 1996 for allegedly ordering the killing of four Iranian dissidents
in Berlin,
but there has never been a report of his being arrested.
The following year a Berlin court convicted
an Iranian secret agent and three Lebanese men in the assassination of the
four Iranian opposition figures in Berlin's Mykonos restaurant on Sept.
17, 1992.
In a finding that led to a crisis in relations between Iran and the European Union, the court said
the assassins were acting on the orders of Iran's top leaders.
Le Matin Dimanche said Antenen's predecessor on the case until 1997, magistrate
Roland Chatelain, had investigated 13 individuals
suspected in the Rajavi slaying, but had decided
against pursuing Fallahian for fear of reprisals
against "little Switzerland."
Iranian officials had no immediate comment on the warrant Sunday.
Rajavi originally fled Iran in 1957 to join the
resistance against Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlevi.
After the overthrow of the shah in 1979, he served for one year as head of
the Iranian Mission to the United Nations in Geneva, but broke with the new leadership.
Associated Press correspondent Angela Charlton in Paris contributed to this report.
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