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Iran Focus
 Berlin,
Nov. 22 – A court in Cologne
rejected on Tuesday allegations that an Iranian man linked to the Iranian
opposition National Council of Resistance of Iran had attacked two men
opposed to the movement.
Ehsan Rajai was cleared
on all counts of charges ranging from assault to attempted kidnapping.
Rajai had charged that the allegations which
turned out to be false had been made by agents of the Iran’s secret police, the Ministry of
Intelligence and Security (MOIS), in Europe on the orders of their control
officers in Tehran.
On September 28, 2004, Farhad Javaheri-Yar and Majid Mashouf, both of whom, according to Rajai,
work for the MOIS, approached the defendant and after an apparent scuffle
claimed that they had been assaulted and were the target of an attempted
kidnapping.
Rajai denied the allegations, saying that he had
been set up by Iran’s
intelligence, which he said had been aggressively pursuing a demonisation campaign against the Iranian opposition Mojahedin-e Khalq and the
umbrella coalition National Council of Resistance.
Within 24 hours of the incident, several Persian-language websites put out
a 20-year-old picture of Rajai and identical
accounts of the affair. The identical accounts bolstered claims by the
opposition group that the websites belong to the MOIS. Rajai’s
defence team had told the Cologne
court that the defendant’s photo had been confiscated during MOIS
house-to-house searches in Tehran
more than a decade ago and said that the accusers could not have obtained
it and posted it on their website in such a short period of time unless the
whole ordeal had been premeditated.
During the trial, the conflicting testimonies of the two accusers left the
prosecutor to request a withdrawal of the charges; however, Rajai demanded that the case continue until a final
court verdict was handed down.
He presented expert medical testimony from doctors and a bloodied shirt as
evidence that he had been attacked by the two men.
The ruling, which declared Javaheri-Yar and Mashouf’s complaints void, is likely to strengthen the
case of Iranian dissidents who claim that they have been victims of a
large-scale disinformation campaign by Tehran’s
intelligence agents in Europe for some
time.
Rajai, whose court costs must now be paid in full
by his accusers, now has the choice of pursuing legal action against the
two men for making false allegations against him.
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