AMIR TAHERI ON THE ASSASSINATIONS IN IRAN…..
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/are_the_mullahs_behind_the_killings_5Y2NRNG4iPuJqwInEUZ5CJ?sms_ss=email&at_xt=4cfb61990caf1427,0
Iranian authorities blame the Americans, British and Israe lis, supposedly working through the anti-regime group People’s Mujahedin, for Monday’s attacks on two nuclear scientists as well as a similar October assassination.
A closer look, however, offers other perspectives.
To start with, the manner of the attacks is not the style of the Mujahedin, who carried out numerous acts of terror both before and after the Khomeinist revolution. To assassinate an individual, they always used snipers — not motorcyclists tossing bombs, like those that on Monday killed Majid Shahriari and seriously injured Fereydoon Abbasi-Davani.
If they wanted to go for bigger carnage, as when they killed more than 70 leaders of the main Khomeinist party in 1981, they used bombs concealed in a building.
In contrast, terror groups controlled by the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini almost always used bombs thrown from motorcycles to murder political opponents.
One of the mullahs who led the murders was Mahdavi Kani. In 1980, less than a year after Khomeini seized power, he boasted that over 300 of the “Motorihaye Allah” (Allah’s motorcyclists) had been active in the final phases of the effort to topple the shah.
And these are not the only recent assassinations in Iran. Other victims include Ghulam-Reza Sarabi, a professor of medicine at Tehran University, and Abdul-Reza Sudbakhsh, also a physician and university professor, as well as two Kurdish Sunni clerics, Mamousa Sheikh al-Islam and Mamousa Borhan. Another victim was Mehdi Takht-Firuz, a prominent politician in Sanandaj, in western Iran. Add, too, Ali Habibi, a Tehran businessman.
To many Iranians, this latest series of murders recalls the “chain killings” under President Mohammad Khatami that claimed the lives of at least 20 intellectuals. Khatami claimed the murders were the work of “rogue elements” in security services; no one was ever punished for the killings.
Is it too much to wonder whether the mullahs’ murder squad is back in operation?
The victims had at least one thing in common: to a lesser or greater degree, they were all perceived either as outright dissidents or closet opponents of the regime.
The three nuclear scientists had publicly spoken against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s controversial re-election last year. The one killed in October, Massud Muhammadi, had been an adviser to former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi’s campaign in that presidential election.
Friends and relatives speaking on condition of anonymity say that Shahriari had developed “deep reservations” about “the way the nuclear project was being diverted from its original peaceful aims.” The same sources claim that he had set out his objections in a long “document” addressed at Mousavi.
Abbasi-Davani, now fighting for his life in a Tehran hospital, is reported to have been “dejected” by the brutal suppression of the Green Movement. Ali Habibi, meanwhile, was a nephew of Mousavi, who is now the regime’s leading opponent inside the country.
Dr. Sarabi may have no direct connection with the dissidents. But he had presented a report on the torture and rape of political prisoners in the Kahrizak Prison for Majlis Speaker Ali Ardeshir-Larijani, also an Ahmadinejad opponent.
The two Kurdish Sunni clerics may have been the latest in a series that has claimed the lives of over 100 Sunni religious leaders across Iran. Suspicion that the regime may be involved in the killings is fueled by the fact that no one has ever been punished for the murders.
Takht-Firuz, who presided over the municipal council in Sanandaj, the capital of Iranian Kurdistan, may have been put on the hit list because he’d spoken against the recent mass arrests of real or suspected dissidents in his city.
By the cardinal questions of detective work — who profited from the crime, who had the motive, the ability and the opportunity to carry it out — the Khomeinist regime appears as the principal suspect in the latest political killings in Iran.
Ahmadinejad may blame the American “Great Satan,” but he may have returned to the “chain killings” introduced under Khatami.
Comments are closed.
