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Iran Focus
 Tehran, Iran,
Nov. 22 – A former senior official in Iran’s dreaded secret police, the Ministry
of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), who personally oversaw the gruesome
murders of two Christian bishops and a priest in Iran in the 1990s, has
been appointed as the new Director General of the country’s Interior
Ministry, Iran Focus has learnt.
Mahmoud Saeedi, who
formerly headed the MOIS department in Isfahan Province,
was removed from his position in 1999 under mounting pressure on the
Iranian government after it became clear that his agents had carried out
the brutal murder of three Anglican Church figures in Iran.
Tehran
initially blamed the 1994 murders on the opposition Mojahedin-e
Khalq (MeK) and brought
several former members of the group on television to testify that they were
responsible for the killings.
But in the aftermath of the 1997 “serial murders” of dissidents and
intellectuals in Iran, which for the first time lifted the lid on numerous
killings by the Intelligence Ministry, journalist Akbar
Ganji shed light on the murders, revealing that
it had been an “inside-job” sanctioned on the orders of Deputy Intelligence
Minister Saeed Emami
and carried out by a team under the command of Mahmoud
Saeedi.
Ganji, who was a senior officer of the
Revolutionary Guards before turning into an investigative journalist and
dissident, is currently serving a six-year prison sentence for his
whistle-blowing articles.
Officials in the Khatami administration later
acknowledged that the murders of Bishop Haik Hovsepian Mehr, Bishop Tateos Michaelian, and
Reverend Mehdi Dibaj
were politically-motivated killings by the MOIS to tarnish the image of the
Iranian opposition group.
Like many other senior officials of the MOIS, Saeedi
left the secret police to work in the Special Security Office of the
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. His boss
in Khamenei’s office was Hojjatoleslam
Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi,
a Shiite cleric who was himself the Deputy Minister of Intelligence and
Security for some 13 years during the late 80s and throughout the 90s.
Pour-Mohammadi has become the Interior Minister
in the hard-line cabinet of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Critics charge that Pour-Mohammadi is replacing Interior Ministry officials with
former colleagues from the secret police, thus creating another security
apparatus.
Pour-Mohammadi has also appointed the former
deputy director of MOIS in Isfahan, Goodarzi,
as Director of Security in the Interior Ministry. Goodarzi’s pseudonym in the
secret service was Shahab.
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