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Iran
Focus
London, Oct. 27
– Italian prosecutors have officially charged a top Iranian official for masterminding
the high-profile assassination of a prominent dissident in 1993.
Italy’s deputy prosecutor-general Franco Ionta
called on Rome’s Criminal Court to hand down a sentence of life
imprisonment for Amir Mansour Bozorgian
for his leading role in the slaying of Mohammad-Hossein Naghdi,
the representative of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) in
Italy.
Ionta argued that Bozorgian,
who is being tried in absentia, had orchestrated Naghdi’s
murder which was carried out on the orders of senior Iranian leaders as
part of a systematic campaign to wipe out opposition figures abroad.
Naghdi, 42, had angered the Iranian authorities
when he defected as Iran’s
charge d’affaires in Italy to join the NCRI.
He was killed when a gunman opened fire from a motorcycle on route to his
office in Rome.
The gunman and the driver of the motorcycle immediately fled the scene.
 At
the time of the killing, Bozorgian, an
under-cover officer of Iran’s secret police, the Ministry of Intelligence
and Security (MOIS), had an Iranian-issued diplomatic passport and was able
to travel with relative ease.
The decision by Italian prosecutors to charge Bozorgian
came on the same day Argentine prosecutors charged seven Iranian officials
including former President Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi
Rafsanjani with masterminding the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community centre
in Buenos Aries.
The attack on the AMIA (Argentine Jewish Mutual Association) centre left 85
people dead and 300 others injured.
The NCRI revealed in the mid-1990s secret information it had obtained from
inside the Iranian regime regarding the role of the Iranian embassy in Italy in
the assassination of Naghdi. It also revealed
information about the assassination of Professor Kazem
Rajavi, the NCRI representative in Switzerland
and the United Nations’ Human  Rights
Commission, the murder of four Iranian dissidents in Berlin, and a string
of assassinations against Iranian dissidents abroad during the same period,
which showed that they were carried out on the direct orders of Iran’s
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and former
President Rafsanjani.
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