Alireza Rezaie said: “[MEK] members were looking for weapons and ammunition to disturb the security in the province, before being captured, [while another 50 were identified and] restrained.”
While another official, Qodtrat Diyalameh, said on Wednesday that the MEK had expanded their activities over the past year during a time of major economic and social crises in Iran and accused foreign intelligence services of employing the MEK.
Rezaie refused to elaborate on how the MEK and foreign intelligence services cooperated, instead claiming that the US, the West in general, Saudi Arabia, and Israel all worked to support the MEK.
He provided no evidence to support this assertion but maintained that the primary goals of the MEK were to create “division” in the Regime, disclose the regime’s inefficiencies, promote non-Islamic culture, and support anti-religion movements. Again, he did not say how the MEK would create division among the Regime members.
Meanwhile, on April 19, Intelligence Minister Mahmoud Alavi said that he had discovered the identity of 290 “CIA agents” both in Iran and elsewhere, including arresting “tens of spies” serving at “sensitive centres” of the country. He said that over the past year, 116 teams related to the MEK has been dealt with, in a transparent attempt to boost morale among members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) after the US designated them as a terror cell. He also refused to go into details.
Of course, it’s important to note that the Regime always downplays the number of arrests in order to make themselves look better. The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) said that far more than 116 people were arrested by the regime in 2018. (Amnesty International counted 7,000 during the protests last January alone.) The NCRI also released the names of 28 political prisoners who are currently in prison and called for urgent international measures for their immediate release.
Maryam Rajavi, President-elect of the Iranian Resistance, once again urged the Secretary-General of the United Nations, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the international human rights organizations to act immediately to ensure those arrested are released. She asked them to appoint delegations to visit the regime’s prisons and meet with political prisoners.
