Rome: Trial begins for Iran official in dissident assassination

Iran Focus: Rome, May 11 – Rome’s Criminal Court started this morning the trial in absentia of an official of the Iranian government accused of taking part in the killing of the representative of the opposition National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) in Italy. Mohammad Hossein Naghdi, who defected to the NCRI when he was the Iranian charge d’affaires in Italy in 1981, was murdered by a gunmen allegedly working for Iran’s notorious Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), on March 16, 1993. Iran Focus

Rome, May 11 – Rome’s Criminal Court started this morning the trial in absentia of an official of the Iranian government accused of taking part in the killing of the representative of the opposition National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) in Italy.

Mohammad Hossein Naghdi, who defected to the NCRI when he was the Iranian charge d’affaires in Italy in 1981, was murdered by a gunmen allegedly working for Iran’s notorious Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), on March 16, 1993.

Western intelligence services say MOIS agents routinely work under diplomatic cover as members of Iran’s diplomatic community. The NCRI revealed in the mid-1990s secret information it had obtained from inside the Iranian regime regarding the role of the Iranian embassy in Italy in the assassination of Naghdi. It also revealed information about the assassination of Professor Kazem Rajavi, the NCRI representative in Switzerland and the United Nations’ Human Rights Commission, the murder of four Iranian dissidents in Berlin, and a string of assassinations against Iranian dissidents abroad during the same period, which showed that they were carried out on the direct orders of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and ex-President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

NCRI President-elect Maryam Rajavi said in a message to the Italian judiciary as the trial opened, “The Iranian people have been waiting for 13 years for the day when the masterminds and perpetrators of Mohammad Hossein Naghdi’s assassination would be brought to justice. Today, the Italian justice is facing a historic challenge”.

She urged the judges in Italy to identify and issue international arrest warrants for the masterminds of the assassination and “withstand the political and diplomatic pressures and the obstacles that the mullahs’ regime is bound to create in order to deviate the course of justice”.

A Berlin court issued arrests in 1997 for a committee made up of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, then-President Ali-Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, then-Foreign Minister Ali-Akbar Velayati, and then-Intelligence Minister Ali Fallahian, after a four-year-trial found that they gave the orders for the assassination of dissidents outside Iran.

Rajavi called for the indictment of Khamenei, Rafsanjani and Iran’s current President Mohammad Khatami by an international tribunal.