Struan Stevenson, a former Member of the European Parliament, wrote an article on Monday, where he stated that there was nothing diplomatic about the conduct of Iranian agent Assadollah Assadi when he was caught trying to bomb the 2018 Free Iran rally in France, attended by 100,000 people, including many foreign dignitaries. 

Stevenson, the Coordinator of the Campaign for Iran Change, explained that Assadi was arrested just after handing over 500 grams of high explosives and a detonator to two people he’d hired to carry out the terrorist action. 

Since then, the Iranian regime has tried to get him released with the claim that Assadi had diplomatic immunity, but this isn’t true because Assadi left his host country to commit a crime and was arrested in Germany, not Austria. Once that move failed, Reuters reported that Assadi threatened violent reprisals across Europe if he is convicted. 

But Stevenson says that Assadi is not the only Iranian official who should be held to account, advising that a terrorist plot of this size could only be authorized by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and President Hassan Rouhani, with help from Foreign Minister Javad Zarif. 

Ironically, the senior diplomat whom Assadi had replaced in the Vienna Embassy was Mostafa Roudaki, another trained [Intelligence] agent. Roudaki had been redeployed to Albania by Zarif, with the rank of the first secretary in the Iranian Embassy in Tirana. He was joined there by a new ambassador appointed by Zarif, Gholam Hossein Mohammadinia, a former high-ranking Iranian intelligence official. Zarif had clearly instructed his new team of “diplomats” in Albania that their mandate was to track down and eliminate the main democratic opposition to the mullahs, the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK), who have created a new compound in the country, Ashraf 3, housing over 2,500 of its members, he said.

Stevenson then began to list off other terrorist plots from 2018 that “bear the fingerprints of Zarif”, including: 

  • The plot to bomb the MEK at their Albanian headquarters on Iranian New Year in 2018, for which two diplomats were expelled 
  • The attempted assassination of an opposition figure in Denmark, for which an Iranian agent is on trial 
  • Terror acts in the Netherlands for which two Iranian diplomats were expelled 

If we are serious about terminating its bomb factories and eliminating its spies, we should close all of Iran’s embassies and expel their diplomatic staff. Khamenei, Rouhani, Zarif, Alavi, and other leaders of the regime should be indicted for genocide and crimes against humanity and brought to trial in the international courts. The time has come for these arch criminals and murderers to be held to account. The European Union and the United Nations must stop its appeasement of this fascist regime, Stevenson concluded.