AFP: Iranian president-elect Mahmood Ahmadinejad was directly involved in plotting the 1989 assassination of a Kurdish rebel leader in Vienna, an official of the banned Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran charged Monday. “According to our information, the Iranian government formed three committees for the assassination” of then KDPI leader Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou, party offical Hassan Ashrafi told AFP at his base in neighbouring Iraq.
AFP
KOI SANJAQ, Iraq – Iranian president-elect Mahmood Ahmadinejad was directly involved in plotting the 1989 assassination of a Kurdish rebel leader in Vienna, an official of the banned Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran charged Monday.
“According to our information, the Iranian government formed three committees for the assassination” of then KDPI leader Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou, party offical Hassan Ashrafi told AFP at his base in neighbouring Iraq.
“The first one planned it, the second one which was led by Ahmadinejad was tasked with facilitating it and the third one executed it.”
Ashrafi said aides of then president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani had approached the KDPI seeking a secret meeting with Ghassemlou which they had then abused to murder him.
Among those present at the July 13 meeting on the Iranian side were three members of the secret service, he said, naming them as Haji Mustafawi, Jaafar Sahraroudi and Mansur Bzurkian.
He said it was Mustafawi who pulled the trigger killing Ghassemlou and Abdullah Qadiri, another KDPI official. When these allegations have surfaced in the past, the officials have not commented.
A third Kurd was also killed, according to Austrian authorities, who said said Saturday they had documents implicating the president-elect in the murders.
“A dossier concerning Mr. Ahmadinejad was submitted to the Federal Counter-Terrorism Agency, which handed it over to the public prosecutor’s office,” interior ministry spokesman Rudolf Gollia said.
But the Iranian foreign ministry flatly denied Ahmadinejad’s involvement in the killings and warned European countries not to be duped by “the Zionist propaganda” campaign to smear the president-elect’s reputation.
“Our recommendation to the Europeans is this: don’t be tricked and fall into the trap of Zionist propaganda,” said ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi.
“They should separate their interests from those of the American and the Zionist regimes.”
Ahmadinejad, who won a shock landslide in a June 24 election run-off, has also been accused of involvement in the 1979 hostage-taking at the US embassy in Tehran, which led to the severing of ties between Iran and the United States the following year.
