August 06, 2021
The Abdurrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran says it has documented 540 cases of Iranian nationals being kidnaped or assassinated abroad since the 1979 revolution.
It says the bulk of the cases date to the 20th Century, but continue to this day, with 70 percent of the killings and kidnappings taking place in Iraqi Kurdistan, which operates largely independent of the Baghdad central government and has long seen a very large presence by the Islamic Republic..
In a statement issued July 27, the Washington, DC-based center said its research has identified more than 540 Iranians whose assassination or kidnapping has been attributed to Iran.
It said countries neighboring Iran have witnessed more attacks, as have countries where transparency and accountability have not been a priority. Iraq (30), excluding Iraqi Kurdistan (380 reported cases), Pakistan (30), and Turkey (28) have had by far the highest number of successful attacks, followed by France (13), Afghanistan (at least 9) and Germany (6). Dissidents have also been killed in smaller numbers in Austria, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Sweden, the Netherlands, the United States, the UAE, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Azerbaijan, India, the Philippines, Poland and Spain, among others.
With a peak in the 1990s of more than 397 (329 in Iraqi Kurdistan) killed and a decline in the 2000s, with 20 known deaths kidnappings, disappearances, and extra-judicial killings “have spread fear in the exile community for over four decades.”
The decline in reported attacks in the 2000s followed the conviction by a German court on April 10, 1997, of four men for the gangland-style murders of three Kurdish leaders and an interpreter in Berlin’s Mykonos restaurant. The German court found that Iran’s political leadership had ordered the killings through a “Committee for Special Operations” whose members included the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, the President, and the Minister of Intelligence, then Ali Fallahian, against whom an arrest warrant was issued. The Mykonos judgment prompted EU member countries to recall their ambassadors from Iran on April 15, 1997.
The center said more recent failed attempts against expatriates include a bombing plot of a Mojahedin-e Khalq gathering near Paris (June 2018) and the attempted kidnapping of Baluchi human rights activist Habibollah Sarbazi (June 2019) in Turkey.
Recent successful attacks include the killing of dissidents Mohammad Reza Kolahi Samadi (December 15, 2015) and Ahmad Mola Nissi (November 8, 2017) in the Netherlands, Ebrahim Safizadeh in Afghanistan (May 22, 2019) and Masud Molavi Vardanjani in Turkey (November 14, 2019,) and a kidnapping in Iraq (October 2019) of journalist and dissident Ruhollah Zam, who was executed in Iran (December 12, 2020).
The Abdurrahman Borou-mand Center for Human Rights in Iran was founded in 2002 by Ladan and Roya Boroumand, who named the center after their father, who was active with the Mossadeghist movement and supported Shahpur Bakhtiar after the 1979 revolution. On April 18, 1991, Boroumand was stabbed to death in the lobby of his Paris apartment building, presumably by agents of the Islamic Republic.
The center says its goal is to “document methodically and as objectively as we can every single execution and assassination and publish stories in Farsi and English with a focus on the right to life and the right to due process of law.”