NCRI-US Staff, 11 August 2018
New information revealed by Iran’s democratic opposition coalition has shed new light on a terror-bombing plan, plotted by Tehran whose target was an opposition rally in Paris on June 30, 2018.
On August 8, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) held a press conference in Brussels where Mohammad Mohaddessin, the NCRI’s Foreign Affairs Committee Chair, shared the results of his organization’s investigation into this potentially catastrophic bombing plot.
According to the NCRI, “On June 30, authorities in Belgium arrested a Belgian-Iranian couple that was in possession of 500 grams of TAPT – an explosive favored by terrorists – and a detonator. The couple were on their way to the ‘Free Iran’ gathering just outside Paris.”
The ‘Free Iran’ gathering is an annual event where tens of thousands of Iranians from around the world join hundreds of political and human rights dignitaries to advocate for freedom and democracy in Iran by lending their support to the NCRI alternative and its president-elect, Mrs. Maryam Rajavi, whose visionary Ten-Point Plan for Future Iran is becoming increasingly popular among Iranians.
News outlets at the time reported that Assadollah Assadi, a diplomat accredited as a third consular to Iran’s embassy in Vienna, Austria, was arrested by German authorities as he was on his way to Austria. The diplomat was later charged by Germans with conspiracy to commit murder and activity as a foreign agent. Belgium has asked for his prompt extradition.
Mohaddessin, told the press conference that Assadi was in fact a foreign agent working for Iran’s notorious Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), under the command of a former IRGC commander, Reza Amiri Moghdam. Assadi is said to be the MOIS’s most important agent in Europe, highly experienced in spy and terror craft such as explosions, reconnaissance and intelligence gathering.
Mohaddessin revealed that the decision to operationalize the bombing plot was made by Iran’s Supreme National Security Council and authorized by the mullahs’ Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
In a recent meticulous study of Tehran’s terrorist operations and assassination of Iranian dissidents in Europe, Dr. Matthew Levitt of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, stated that the Paris bomb plot was “the latest example of how active Iranian intelligence operatives have been in Europe as of late.”
The study, entitled “Iran’s Deadly Diplomats” and published in CTC Sentinel, underlines the fact that “The Assadi arrest is, therefore, just the most recent alleged example of Iranian state-sponsored terrorism in which Tehran uses visiting government officials or accredited diplomats to plot terrorist attacks.”
Last month, a senior State Department official speaking on background with members of the press said, “The most recent example [of Tehran’s terrorist activities in Europe] is the plot that the Belgians foiled, and we had an Iranian diplomat out of the Austrian embassy as part of the plot to bomb a meeting of Iranian opposition leaders in Paris.”
Among the recent examples of Tehran-sponsored terrorism in Europe is also the thwarted terrorist plot in Albania. Dr. Levitt reports that “In March 2018, Albanian authorities arrested two Iranian operatives on terrorism charges after being caught allegedly surveilling a location where Iranian New Year (Nowruz) celebrations were about to begin.”
The New Year celebration mentioned here is the event held by members of Iran’s democratic opposition, the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK), who since 2016 have resettled in Albania from Iraq.
Formed in 1965 as opposition to the Shah’s despotic rule, the PMOI, also known as Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), is pro-democracy, nationalist, progressive, and anti-fundamentalist. It is the best-organized Iranian opposition and, as a key member of the NCRI coalition, is dedicated to a secular and democratic republic.
The PMOI/MEK network inside Iran has been expanding in recent months and is playing a major role, as acknowledged by several of regime’s top officials, including Khamenei and his President, Hassan Rouhani, in the nationwide protests in Iran that began in December 2017.
The heightened anti-government campaign of the MEK inside Iran coincides with the rising international standing of the NCRI as the only identifiable and viable alternative to the mullahs’ regime. This explains why the regime, at this very critical international and diplomatic juncture, decided to try to hand a major blow to the NCRI and the MEK in France and Albania at the risk of getting caught, as it was, red-handed.
