Esfandiar Rahim Masha’ie, who was recently appointed as a Vice-President and Head of Iran’s Cultural Heritage and Tourism Organisation, had two separate meetings with Jack Straw and British Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell while in London for the inaugural ceremony of an Iranian arts exhibition in the British Museum.
The state-run Iranian news agency said that Straw welcomed Irans new hard-line government, led by ultra-conservative President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Mashaie is from the northern Iranian town of Tonekabon, which was called Shahsavar prior to Irans 1979 Islamic revolution. In 1974, Mashaie joined the Hojjatieh association. Hojjatieh was a semi-clandestine religious and political group that was set up in the early 1950s in Iran by Sheikh Mahmoud Tavallai, popularly known as Sheikh Halabi, an extremist Shiite cleric who founded the group to eradicate members of the Bahai faith. Irans new President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was also closely associated with the leaders of the group.
Critics say throughout his career since the early 1980s, Mashaies has been working for Irans secret police, the Ministry of Intelligence and Security.
According to knowledgeable sources, Mashaie personally executed two of his close relatives: his nephew, Ali Salehi, and his cousin, Ahmad-Reza Rahim Mashaie. Both were supporters of the Iranian opposition group, the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MeK).
Tonekabon residents say Esfandiar Rahim Masha’ie was known for his brutality against the relatives of dissidents. He once sentenced the father of an opposition activist to four years in prison. At the end of the sentence period, Mashaie demanded that he continue to remain behind bars since the man had refused to disown his son.
They called him the Butcher in Tonekabon in the 1980s, said Saeed Shirkhodai, who fled his native city in northern Iran and now lives in exile in Sweden. People of Tonekabon, Ramsar, and other nearby cities and towns in western Mazadaran still remember the horrific crimes of Mashaie.
Mashaies appointment by Ahmadinejad, who was himself a top commander in Irans Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, follows the same pattern that characterised the selection of new ministers. Ahmadinejads cabinet includes about a dozen individuals who were at some stage in their careers officers in the IRGC or its affiliated organs and at least five former senior officials of the Ministry of Intelligence and Security.
Jack Straws handshake with a man identified as a killer and torturer of political prisoners has angered many in the Iranian exile community in Europe.
Hamid Solhju, an Iranian exile living in London, said the Foreign Secretary should not have met a man who has a notorious past as an executioner and a torturer.
Havent we had enough? Is there no end to this appeasement?, he said.
Irans state-run media have given much coverage to Straws meeting with Mashaie in a bid to counter the perception among ordinary Iranians that the country is becoming increasingly isolated under the new ultra-Islamist government.
