Iran’s secret police will prosecute MP for foreign interview

Iran Focus: Tehran, Iran, Mar. 12 – Iran’s notorious Ministry of Intelligence and Security announced on Wednesday that it would prosecute a member of the Iranian Majlis (Parliament) for doing an interview with the U.S. broadcaster Voice of America. Iran Focus

Tehran, Iran, Mar. 12 – Iran’s notorious Ministry of Intelligence and Security announced on Wednesday that it would prosecute a member of the Iranian Majlis (Parliament) for doing an interview with the U.S. broadcaster Voice of America.

VOA recently conducted an interview with Iranian lawmaker Noureddin Pir-Moazzen, spokesman for the minority fraction in Majlis.

“This action was frankly disgusting and a betrayal”, Intelligence Minister Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei told reporters. His comments were carried by the government-run news agency Mehr and the website of the state broadcasting service.

Radical Shiite cleric Mohseni-Ejei said that even ordinary Iranians should not carry out interviews with foreign media.

“Guidelines have been handed down to officials on this matter, making this a legal issue. We will follow up any breaches of these guidelines”, he said.

Asked whether the Intelligence Ministry would take action against Pir-Moazzen, the Iranian intelligence minister said, “In any case, this issue must be followed up. The Intelligence Ministry will definitely take action against such people”.

Pir-Moazzen, who is currently in the U.S., on Wednesday alluded to the fact that discussion of certain subjects in public were considered as “red lines” by the Islamic Republic, and maintained that he did not cross any such threshold in his interview on VOA.

“I did not discuss matters considered as a red line, and I still respect these boundaries”, he told the Fars news agency, run by the office of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Mohseni-Ejei has a chequered background and is one of the most feared men in the Islamic Republic.

In the 1990s, he was directly involved in the serial murder of dissidents and issued religious edicts (fatwa) authorising the murders. A defector from Iran’s intelligence services has described how a writer and translator, Pirouz Davani, was abducted and killed on his orders.

Mohseni Ezhei was appointed as prosecutor in the Special Tribunal for the Clergy in 1998, and since then he had passed prison or death sentences for many dissident clerics.