Swiss judge orders arrest of Iran’s former intelligence chief

Iran Focus: Paris, Apr. 08 – A Swiss judge has issued an international arrest warrant for the former head of Iran’s notorious secret police for his role in the assassination of a prominent Iranian dissident.
Iran Focus

Paris, Apr. 08 – A Swiss judge has issued an international arrest warrant for the former head of Iran’s notorious secret police for his role in the assassination of a prominent Iranian dissident.

The warrant was issued to law enforcement agencies for the arrest of Hojjatoleslam Ali Fallahian, who for years headed Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS). Fallahian was charged with masterminding the assassination of Prof. Kazem Rajavi, a renowned human rights advocate and elder brother of Iranian opposition leader Massoud Rajavi.

Kazem Rajavi, then the representative of the opposition National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) in Switzerland, was gunned down in broad daylight by several MOIS agents on April 24, 1990 as he was driving to his home in Coppet, a village near Geneva.

A statement released by the NCRI on Saturday said that the warrant issued by Swiss Investigative Magistrate Jacques Antenen called on law enforcement agencies to arrest “Ali Fallahian, former Minister of Intelligence and Security of the Islamic Republic of Iran and transfer him to the Canton Vaud Prison in Lausanne, Switzerland”.

The Swiss judge’s ruling added that prior to the assassination of Kazem Rajavi, Fallahian had also ordered the assassination of Massoud Rajavi.

The NCRI charged that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and former President Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani were also “directly involved” in ordering the assassination and should be issued international arrest warrants as well.

“13 persons were involved in planning and carrying out the murder. All of them had service passports, marked ’on assignment.’ A number of those documents had been issued on the same day in Tehran”, Judge Antenen announced.

He added that the MOIS had close ties with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), particularly the Qods (Jerusalem) Force, and “Minister Fallahian was responsible for assassinations and issuing the orders for all such missions”.

Kazem Rajavi was Iran’s first Ambassador to the United Nations headquarters in Geneva following the 1979 Islamic revolution. Shortly after his appointment, he resigned his post in protest to the “repressive policies and terrorist activities of the ruling clerics in Iran”.

He then intensified his campaign against mass executions, arbitrary arrests, and torture carried out by Iran’s theocratic leadership.

At the age of 56, he held six doctorate degrees in the fields of law, political science, and sociology from the universities of Paris and Geneva.

Two of the hitmen were later discovered in France and arrested by French police. Despite a warrant for their arrest by the authorities in Switzerland, the French government boarded them on a direct flight to Tehran. The French action drew international condemnation including from the United States Department of State.

Fallahian, who is currently an advisor on security affairs to Supreme Leader Khamenei and a member of the Assembly of Experts, is believed to have plotted other high-profile terrorist strikes and assassination of Iranian dissidents elsewhere in Europe and the Middle East.

In 1997, a court in Berlin implicated Fallahian, Khamenei, Rafsanjani, and then-Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati in masterminding the 1992 killing of four Kurdish dissidents in a restaurant called the Mykonos.

Iranian exiles charge that the MOIS continues to have a heavy presence in Europe and has stepped up intelligence gathering operations against Iranian dissidents since hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took office as President.