October 04, 2007
Did Ahmadinejad Personally Murder Iranian Dissidents?
For some time now, there have been rumours that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was personally involved in a 1989 Vienna murder of three Kurdish politicians by an Iranian hit squad. The three dead were Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou, leader of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI), and his two associates Abdullah Ghaderi Azar and Fadhil Rassoul.
John Rosenthal publishes this translation of Georg Hoffmann-Ostenhof's interview with "Witness D" who claims to have been at the scene and that one of the men involved was Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:
Profil: What role did Ahmadinejad play in Vienna?Read the rest here.D: He was a kind of backup. If something should happen to one of the commando members, he would have been the replacement. But he was not needed.
Profil: But he was there at the scene.
D: He waited in front of the building...
D: There was a team of negotiators and a hit squad. Ahmadinejad was the link between the Iranian Embassy in Vienna and the hit squad. It was also his job to supply the weapons. He brought them from the Embassy to the house where the murders took place.
Profil: How many people were there in the hit squad? Various sources now claim that in addition to this group and the negotiating team, there was also a third unit.
D: With Ahmadinejad as the backup, there were three people in the hit squad. One cannot speak of a third unit. There were other people -- who supplemented the hit squad. If the latter had failed, they would have jumped in.
Profil: In your report, you write that the two who pulled the triggers had traveled to Austria from Abu Dhabi under assumed names. How did Ahmadinejad enter the country?
D: With a diplomatic passport.
Credible? I doubt it. But the one thing that is sure is that during the 1980s an 90s the Iranians did send hit squads around the world to murder opposition figures. John's article also points out that at least 33 Iranian opposition figures have died on European soil.
Iran assassinating people seems believable. Ahmadinejad's personal involvement seems a little harder to swallow.
