January 10, 2020
A group of Iranian-Americans is urging US Attorney-General William Barr to investigate Hossein Mousavian, a former Iranian ambassador to Germany and currently an academic at Princeton University, for complicity in crimes against humanity.
“We are Iranian-Americans who are deeply concerned about the presence of Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a known agent of Iran’s regime, on American soil,” 25 members of the US-Iranian community wrote Barr.
Reza Behrouz – a physician in San Antonio – along with Peter Kohanloo, president of Iranian-American Majority, who signed the letter, also wrote an op-ed article in the New York Post titled, “Teaching at Princeton — with blood on his hands.”
The letter says, “Mousav-ian’s presence on US soil serves no purpose but to promote the ideology and interests of America’s staunchest enemy and sow fear and division within the Iranian-American community.”
Mousavian was Tehran’s ambassador to Germany in 1992 when Iran’s regime authorized the assassination of four Iranian dissidents in the Mykonos restaurant in Berlin. A Berlin court found that Iran’s embassy “served as the headquarters for the terrorists involved” in the murders, according to the letter.
Behrouz and Kohanloo wrote in the New York Post that as ambassador to Germany, Mousavian was “running interference for the regime, he dismissed the charges as a ‘joke’ and predicted that ‘the judges are sure to vote in Iran’s favor.’ The judges didn’t, however.
Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs appointed Mousavian a visiting scholar in 2009 when he left Iran while under attack from hardliners. Since then, he has written many newspaper and magazine articles from his base at Princeton that defend the regime in Western terms and avoid regime rhetoric.
“Given his history, we, the undersigned, believe that Mr. Mousavian is a threat to the US national security and a danger to dissidents in the Iranian-American community,” wrote the 25 signatories.
