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Copyright © 1994-98, by the Middle East Data Project, Inc. All rights reserved.
In a startling and unprecedented admission, Iran's Intelligence Ministry issued a public statement on January 5 acknowledging that renegade agents were responsible for the recent "serial murders" of political dissidents and intellectuals inside Iran, and pledged to bring them to justice.
The admission, apparently forced upon the MOIS by widespread student demonstrations last month and by the personal intervention of President Khatami, did not name those responsible for the deaths of Darioush and Parvaneh Forouhar, the leaders of the Iran Nation's Party who were found brutally stabbed to death in their heavily-guarded Tehran apartment on November 22. Since then, dissident writers Mohammad Mokhtari and Mohammad Jafar Pouyandeh were also found murdered, as was a journalist, Majid Sharif. Two other dissidents remain missing, one since August.
But the statement, called by a leading Iranian political analyst from the University of Tehran as "unprecedented in Iranian history," was clearly a blow for hard-liners and gave President Khatami more room to maneuver in his struggle to reform Iran's faltering but brutal clerical system.
"With the cooperation of President's special investigating committee," the statement read, "the Ministry has succeeded in identifying the network and arresting its members and finally handing them over to the law authorities. Unfortunately some of the irresponsible colleagues of this ministry with deviatory thoughts acting on their own and without doubt as surreptitious agents and in the interest of aliens perpetrated these crimes. Such a horrendous act has not only betrayed and inflicted harm to the unknown soldiers of imam-e zaman (may Allah hasten his reappearance) but also have to a very great extent tarnished the credibility of the sovereign state of the Islamic Republic of Iran. With full confidence and all its power, the ministry pledges to follow up the complicated case until all the bandits, gangsters and those alien agents both within and outside the country involved in such destructive designs, which run contrary to laws of the nation, are identified, brought to justice and uprooted."
The MOIS statement came only five days after the head of the Judiciary branch, Ayatollah Mohammad Yazdi, rejected calls for an international investigation into the killings, telling a Friday prayer audience on January 1: "In Algeria there have been savage killings ...but there is no question there of a United Nations investigation team. But when two or three people are killed in our country, immediately it is blown out of proportion and it is said that an investigative team must go and see what is happening."
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamene'i made similar remarks in December, accusing the United States and Israel of having plotted the assassinations to create instability in Iran.
Reacting to the Information Ministry's statement, Ms Parastou Foruhar, the daughter of the murdered couple told the Paris-based Iran Press Service that it was the "most horrible and disgusting news I could have ever heard. Authorities and agents who are supposed to be the protectors of our nation's security have turned to be the killers of the nation's bravest sons and daughters. One can not stop here, thinking that with the arrest of five or six unidentified people, the whole affair is over. They (the authorities) have been forced under pressures from the Iranian and international public opinion to do something. Now, it is time to push them further, force them to say the truth, to give the names of the real murderers", she said.
Dr Karim Lahiji, a Paris-based lawyer and president of the Iranian League of Human Rights, said that the arrest of few agents of the Information Ministry or a statement acknowledging that the security agents participated in the killing of dissidents was not enough. "All those responsible, directly or indirectly in the murder of all the dissidents must be brought to justice and tried in public, with the presence of international press and observers. It is the duty of the Justice Ministry to bring court all those involved in the murders, whatever the rank or position. But as the Islamic Judiciary is not independent, therefore we call for open trial of all the suspects."
Salam calls for resignation: In Tehran, the leftist pro-Khatami daily Salam called for the resignation of Intelligence Minister Qorbanali Dorri-Najafabadi on January 7. "Few people do not know that the intelligence minister was not the president's choice, and he has not had the necessary cooperation with the president," Salam wrote in a lead editorial. "The least that must be done now is to replace him and probe his performance."
Many analysts believe that the MOIS admission has given a boost to Khatami and his reformist camp in their struggle against the hard-line clerics. A Tehran University professor currently in the United States as a visiting scholar in Washington, DC, called the MOIS admission "unprecedented in Iranian history," and said it gave President Khatami "the opportunity to inject some of his own people into that Ministry, and that is a major change. For months now every writer, every actor, every movie director in Iran has been afraid for his life," he said. "My own wife called me recently asking me to be careful when I return to Tehran."
Salam has been leading the charge against the security services and their subservience to the hard-liners. Already on the morning of January 5, hours before IRNA issued the MOIS confession of guilt, Salam alleged that the assassinations were the work of "elements inside the regime." "Anyone who has cared for this regime and this revolution can not imagine that some persons inside the power have reached that such a degree of deviation to regard as legitimate that kind of crimes and think that by committing such crimes one can serve Islam and the Islamic regime", Salam wrote. Never before has the semi-official Tehran press made such an accusation without immediate reprisal.
Special Operations Committee: Salam appears to have gained access to a Top Secret report, delivered to President Khatami on December 31, that exposed the existence and detailed the operations of the Special Operations Committee which reports to Supreme Leader Ali Khamene'i, which is in charge of eliminating opponents of Velayat-e faghih, or clerical rule.
The SOC is said to be headed by former Intelligence Minister Ali Fallahian, who became an advisor to Khamene'i after Khatami took over as President in August 1997, and by Hojjat-ol eslam Hasan Akhtari, a former Ambassador to Damascus who is now the adviser of Mr. Khamene'i for Arab and Palestinian affairs. A German court issued an arrest warrant against Fallahian for his role in orchestrating the Mykonos restaurant killings of four Kurdish dissidents in Berlin in 1992. Iranian defectors mentioned the SOC in testimony offered during the Mykonos trial. The warrant against Fallahian remains in effect today.
The operational wing of the SOC is run by Rev. Guards Brigadier General Mohammad Baqr Zolqadr, his deputy, Hossein Abdollahi, commander of the 41st Sarallah Division of the Guards, and the sons of Assadollah Lajaverdi, the "butcher of Evin" who was assassinated several months ago by the Mujahedin in Tehran. Also named as part of the SOC was Hossein Shariatmadari, who was appointed by Khamene'i as Executive Editor of Keyhan newspaper, which is the mouthpiece of the Intelligence Ministry.
Defector charges plot: In Germany, a member of the ruling clergy arrested in late December while transiting the Frankfurt airport en route to Canada, told the German government and Iranian exiles that the Special Operations Committee carried out the recent murders in Tehran on the orders of Ayatollah Khamene'i. The cleric, identified by Iran Press Service as Hojjat-ol eslam Ja'far Baqrian Avazi, originally presented himself to the German authorities as an advisor to the Majlis "Crisis Committee." He also provided the German authorities with a hit list of 179 persons currently under "scrutiny" by the Special Operations Committee.
A Frankfurt-based dissident, Mehdi Khanbaba Tehrani, who said he had reviewed the hit list presented by Baqrian, said it included senior staff members of the banned publications "Tous" and "Iran-e Farda," members of the Iran Freedom Movement including its leader, Ebrahim Yazdi, prominent nationalists and liberals, female journalists and intellectuals, as well as journalists, women's rights advocates and dissident politicians living in exile.
A clandestine group known as Fedayeen-e Eslam, affiliated with Ayatollah Khamene'i and other top regime leaders, publicly claimed responsibility for the murders in a series of statements faxed to Tehran dailies, but simultaneous faxes also purporting to emanate from the group to other dailies denied any involvement.
On January 4, former President Banisadr issued a statement from his office in Versailles quoting a second clerical defector identified as Hojjat-ol eslam Parvazi as saying that the order to assassinate the Forouhars and the dissident intellectuals was personally signed by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamene'i and carried out by Brigadier General Mohammad Baqr Zolqadr.