Twenty years of detention for the Iranian diplomat Assadollah Assadi and sentences of fifteen to eighteen years for his three accomplices, Belgo-Iranians who acted under the orders of the one that the correctional court of Antwerp described as “The operational brain” of an attack which was to take place in France, in Villepinte (Seine-Saint-Denis), on June 30, 2018. A bomb was to explode there during a meeting of the opposition to the Tehran regime.
Thursday, February 4, the judges followed almost to the letter the requisitions of the federal prosecutor who had held against the four accused the charges of attempted murder of a terrorist nature and participation in a terrorist group.
“This is a historic verdict with, for the first time, the official conviction of a diplomat”, comments Maryam Rajavi, president of the National Council of Iranian Resistance (NCRI), the opposition coalition to the regime.
Amir Saadouni and his companion, Nasimeh Naami, were arrested in Brussels on the day of the meeting, while they were transporting the explosive device that Assadi had given them two days earlier in Luxembourg. The bomb, based on acetone peroxide (TATP), had been made in Iran and carried in a diplomatic bag on board an airliner. A foreign intelligence service – presumably the Israeli Mossad – had intercepted conversations about the attack. The fourth member of the group, the poet Mehrdad Arefani, had been arrested in Villepinte. Like his two companions, he will be stripped of his Belgian nationality.
Iran condemns the sentence
Judges appointed a sub-section of Iran’s intelligence and security ministry (MONTH) as the instigator of the project. They also recognized the involvement of a “Undetermined number” Iranian agents. The court, on the other hand, refused to clearly designate the highest authorities of the Tehran regime as the real sponsors of the action, considering that the evidence of their participation was insufficient.
Iran has already condemned “Firmly” the sentence pronounced against his diplomat through the voice of the spokesperson for his diplomacy, Said Khatibzadeh. “All stages of Mr. Assadi’s arrest, the legal process and the verdict are illegal and go against international law”, he argued.
The NCRI, the opposition coalition targeted at Villepinte, maintains, for its part, that it is indeed the Supreme Security Council, under the authority of President Hassan Rohani, which had decided on the project, then validated by the Supreme Guide Ali Khamenei and conducted in cooperation with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “It is, in any case, dreadful to note that Iranian agents act in this way in Europe”, comments Me Georges-Henri Beauthier, one of the opposition lawyers.
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