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. 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 Irans 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 Irans 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. Rajais defence team had told the Cologne court that the defendants 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 Mashoufs 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 Tehrans 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.
