According to a report in the Washington Free
Beacon, newly elected Iranian President Hassan Rohani was a member of
Iran's secretive Special Affairs Committee, tasked with recommending
individuals for targeting and implementing the assassinations.
Iranian President Hassan
Rohani was implicated in the Buenos Aires bombing by Abolghasem Mesbahi,
a former Iranian intelligence official who defected from Iran in the
1990s
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Photo credit: AP |
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Newly elected Iranian President Hassan Rohani
was a member of the secretive government council in charge of
orchestrating the country's global terrorist campaign in the 1990s, the
Washington Free Beacon has reported.
According to a 2008 report by the Iran Human
Rights Documentation Center -- a non-profit research institute that was
funded largely through U.S. State Department grants until 2009 -- the
Special Affairs Council was tasked with recommending individuals for
targeting and implementing the assassinations after Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei signed off on the operation.
"After [Iranian Revolution leader Ayatollah]
Khomeini's death [in 1989], the responsibility for recommending
individual assassinations fell to the Special Affairs Committee. Once
the committee's recommendation was approved by the Supreme Leader, an
individual committee member would be charged with implementing the
decision with the assistance of the Ministry of Intelligence's Special
Operations Council," the report says.
According to the Washington Free Beacon, Iran
reportedly carried out at least 162 political assassinations between
1979 and 1999, with the vast majority taking place in the 1990s.
Rohani was a special representative for Khamenei on the committee in the mid-1990s, according to the IHRDC report.
The Free Beacon reported that Rohani sat on
the committee when it planned the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish
community center in Buenos Aires, according to a 2006 indictment by the
Argentine government prosecutor investigating the case.
The bombing killed 85 and wounded hundreds more. It is one of the deadliest terrorist attacks in Argentina's history.
Abolghasem Mesbahi, a former Iranian
intelligence official who defected from Iran in the 1990s, testified
about Rohani's involvement in Iran's state-sponsored terrorism.
"With regard to the committee's role in the
decision to carry out the AMIA attack, Moghadam stated that this
decision was made under the direction of Ali Khamenei, and that the
other members of the committee were [then-Iranian president Ali Akbar
Hashemi] Rafsanjani, Mir Hejazi, Rohani, Velayati and Fallahijan," the
indictment said.
While the Special Affairs Committee's work is
secretive and its existence is not acknowledged in the Iranian
constitution, Rohani has publicly supported a global campaign targeting
"counterrevolutionary" elements, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
According to a TIME Magazine report from 2001, in 1994 Rohani was quoted as telling a student newspaper that "[Iran] will not hesitate to destroy the activities of counterrevolutionary groups abroad."
IHRDC executive director Gissou Nia told the
Washington Free Beacon that the political situation was "quite fluid" in
Iran and that Rohani's past human rights record might not necessarily
determine his future decisions.
Regardless, "it's quite certain he would have been
involved in some level of different decisions and policy choices that
are not quite appealing," Nia said. "He could not have not known about
all of that."
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