News on the MEK

Maryam Rajavi prosecuted over human rights violations

Former Members Prosecute Rajavi

Former members of Mojahedin-e Khalq organization take action against the leaders of this organization in France.

According to Le Parisien, Massoud Khodabandeh, Karim Haqqi Moni, Massoud Tayebi and Jamshid Tahmasebi-four former members of MKO-have accused MKO leaders of violating human rights and freedoms as well as torturing and endangering the lives of other people.

About their complaint in French Judiciary, Le Parisien wrote: “Maryam Rajavi and her husband allow themselves to interfere in the private lives of the members and break their marital relations.”

This paper notes that these four men were former members of MKO, adding: “The leaders of this organization have issued execution order for Tayebi and Haqqi to prevent them from leaving the organization but they have been able to escape to Europe and get political asylum from Netherlands government.”

According to Le Parisien, Khodabandeh was Rajavi’s bodyguard. When he decided to leave MKO, they injected narcotics into his body and Tahmasebi was under heavy mental tortures.

Le Parisien quotes French security service: â€œthis organization never allowed its members to open an account. It has been listed as a terrorist organization by the US and EU.”

July 11, 2005 0 comments

USA

U.S. troops surround Iranian opposition group in Iraq

CAMP ASHRAF, Iraq (AP) – The U.S. army surrounded camps of an Iranian opposition group in eastern Iraq on Friday, demanding they lay down their arms or "be destroyed."

Surrender negotiations between U.S. officials and the Mujahedeen Khalq continued past nightfall with no apparent resolution, though the Americans appeared confident of an agreement. The confrontation came three weeks after a truce between the Iranians and the army, which U.S. officials said had been a "prelude" to surrender.

But the group’s well-armed force, which for years has fought Iran’s Islamic rulers with the backing of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, poses a potential challenge to the U.S.-led coalition’s authority as Iraq’s military occupier and U.S. troops said they were prepared for full-scale combat.

U.S. Abrams tanks lined nearby highways and helicopters flew low over the low-slung sandstone buildings that are Camp Ashraf, the group’s headquarters. U.S. officials said thousands of Mujahedeen fighters were inside.

Under the April 15 truce, the Mujahedeen Khalq could keep its weapons to defend itself against Iranian attacks but had to stop manning checkpoints it had set up, with armed fighters in khaki uniforms behind sandbagged emplacements and Jeeps mounted with machine-guns.

At the time, the U.S. State Department called the agreement "a prelude to the group’s surrender."

"This has been in the works for a while. The ceasefire was a stepping stone to the capitulation agreement," military spokesman Capt. Josh Felker said.

But reports of roadblock confrontations involving the group in recent days suggested it had continued playing an active, armed role in the region. U.S. military commanders "don’t want two armed forces in the area," Felker said.

Still, he indicated the standoff with the group – listed by the United States as a terrorist organization since the 1990s – could be resolved peacefully.

"As far as I know, they are agreeing to capitulate at this time," he said.

The Mujahedeen Khalq was negotiating with Gen. Ray Odierno, commander of the U.S. army’s 4th Infantry Division.

The U.S. ultimatum also came amid reports fighters loyal to an Iranian-based anti-Saddam group, the Badr Brigade, have been infiltrating into the area near the Mujahedeen’s base. The United States fears clashes between the two opposing groups.

Mujahedeen Khalq forces also contend Iranian fighters ambushed them at least once in recent days, wounding one.

Friday’s confrontation pits the United States against a group that spent a generation fighting Iran’s clerical regime – the government President George W. Bush includes in his "axis of evil."

More negotiations were planned for Sunday morning but the U.S. army wouldn’t comment further about whether Friday’s talks produced any progress.

The choices for the paramilitaries appeared bleak. U.S. military talking points gave the following guidance, using the group’s acronym: "MEK forces will be destroyed or compelled to surrender, leading to disarmament and detention."

The Mujahedeen Khalq, the People’s Warriors, is the military wing of the Paris-based National Council of Resistance of Iran, an umbrella body said to unite Iran’s diverse opposition groups.

Before Saddam’s ouster, the group helped train Saddam’s elite Republican Guard units, the U.S. military said. It has several camps near Baqubah, about 70 kilometres northeast of the Iraqi capital Baghdad and not far from the Iranian border.

It was allied with the late ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s Islamic fundamentalists during the 1979 revolution that overthrew the pro-U.S. dictatorship of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. But the new government soon banned the Mujahedeen Khalq and other groups that advocated a secular regime.

In the past, Washington deemed the Mujahedeen Khalq a terrorist organization. Iran’s clerical government has said it was hypocritical of the United States to describe the group as terrorist, yet still sanction its existence.

During the 1970s, the group was accused in attacks that killed several U.S. military personnel and civilians working on defence projects in Iran, although the group denies targeting Americans. It was reported to have backed the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in the Iranian capital Tehran in 1979.

July 3, 2005 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq Organization as a terrorist group

International Arrest Warrant for MKO Members

Swiss-based newspaper of "Le Temp" revealed in a report that six MKO members who commuted in UN Commissions were banned according to an international arrest warrant which was issued by Interpol.

Le Temp wrote: "It’s about six opponents of regime in Tehran, who lobbied in the UN Commissions. A year ago, they were banned from entering UN buildings due to prosecution by Iranian officials. In March 2003, Libyan head of Human Rights Commission at that time, replied to Iranian officials’ letter that for preventing people from entering these buildings there should be convincing reasons, such as an international arrest warrant. In the next year, 2004, the warrant had been issued by Interpol. So, the doors of the UN were automatically closed on these dangerous terrorists."

July 2, 2005 0 comments

USA

US shuts down Iran opposition group

The United States shut down the offices of the political wing of the Iranian opposition People’s Mujahedeen, closing a loophole that had allowed the group to operate despite being designated “terrorist” organisation.

State, Treasury and Justice departments closed the Washington office of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) on Friday, placing notices on its doors declaring that it was now banned, officials said.

US federal agents acted after Secretary of State Colin Powell clarified earlier “terrorist” designations of the NCRI’s parent organisation, the People’s Mujahedeen or Mujahedeen e Khalq (MEK), they said.

No one was in the office when agents arrived, according to one official.

Telephone calls to the group’s representatives were not answered.

The order also freezes the group’s US assets and bars US citizens from making contributions to it, the officials said.

In addition, they said suspected members of the group in the United States had been notified that their continued affiliation was now illegal.

"Any continued material support for the MEK or use of its facilities or property under any of its aliases and any unauthorized dealing in property in which the MEK has an interest is a violation of US law," one official said.

Clampdown

"Its history is studded with anti-Western attacks as well as terrorist attacks on the interests of the clerical regime in Iran and abroad."

-The US State Department in the latest edition of its "Patterns of Global Terrorism" report Powell’s clarification, published in the Federal Register, said the MEK under all of its aliases – including the NCRI, the National Council of Resistance and the People’s Mujahedeen Organisation of Iran (PMOI) – are now considered "foreign terrorist organizations."

The designation includes "its US representative office and all other offices worldwide," Powell said.

His decision was "based on information from a variety of sources that those entities functioned as part of the MEK and have supported the MEK’s acts of terrorism," said Tom Casey, a State Department spokesman.

In a separate notice, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control declared the NCRI under all of its aliases "including its US press office" to be a "Specially Designated Global Terrorist" group.

Friend or foe?

The People’s Mujahedeen was first named a "terrorist" organisation in 1997, when the administration of President Bill Clinton took the step as a conciliatory gesture to Iran.

Iran welcomed the decision at the time but until Friday the Washington office of the NCRI remained open while it fought the ban in US courts.

Amid the uncertainty over its status, the NCRI gave frequent news conferences at its office in the National Press Building, just blocks from the White House, and at Washington hotels to denounce the Iranian government.

At times, the United States used information provided by the NCRI to highlight its concerns about Iran’s nuclear programme, which Washington believes is a cover for atomic weapons development.

Confusion over the group’s status was a complicating factor during the Iraq war as US troops were forced to confront armed elements of the People’s Mujahedeen to which former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had given shelter.

Asked to address the apparent contradiction, State Department spokesmen had repeatedly demurred, referring reporters to the Justice Department which enforces US federal laws.

Exiled revolutionaries

The group – which is also considered a “terrorist” organisation by the European Union and Iran – denies all wrongdoing and maintains that it represents legitimate opponents to Tehran’s religious leadership.

With a programme that blends left-wing and Islamic ideology, it took part in the 1979 revolution in Iran, but the movement was suppressed in the years that followed and its members fled abroad with the military wing taking refuge in Iraq in 1986.

The State Department has accused the group of conducting "internal security operations in support of the government of Iraq" during Saddam’s time in power.

French crackdown

The US move against the People’s Mujahedeen follows a similar crackdown on the group in France, where police raided their headquarters in a Paris suburb in June, arresting scores of people.

The group’s leader, Maryam Rajavi, was one of more than 160 people detained in the raids and her arrest outraged her followers, with a spate of self-immolation protests across Europe that left two women dead.

Rajavi and 16 others who were then placed under investigation were granted conditional release in early July after two weeks in detention, although that does not preclude charges being brought against them.

July 2, 2005 0 comments

Human Rights Abuse in the MEK

Rights group cites Iran exiles MKO for abuses

A human rights group Thursday leveled charges of torture, psychological abuse and even murder against an Iranian dissident organization that some members of Congress and other influential figures in Washington view as potential allies against the Islamic government in Tehran.

Human Rights Watch, the international advocacy group, made the charges in a report based on people who describe themselves as dissidents and defectors from the group, the Mujahedin al-Khalq or MEK. Former members, interviewed by human rights watch, ?reported abuses ranging from detention and persecution of ordinary members wishing to leave the organization, to lengthy solitary confinements, severe beatings, and torture of dissident members,? Human Rights Watch said.

Mohammad Hussein Sobhani, reached by telephone by MSNBC.com, confirmed that he was held in solitary confinement for eight-and-a-half years inside the group’s encampment in Iraq, from 1992 until 2001, when Saddam Hussein’s government was sheltering and arming the MEK.

I was beaten severely for disagreeing with them, but I thought it would not last. It lasted for years,? Sobhani said.

Sobhari eventually was turned over to Saddam’s government, then repatriated to Iran with a group of Iran-Iraq war POWs. He says he escaped from Iranian detention and made his way to Europe.

The MEK is on the State Department’s list of terrorist groups. However, it also is credited in 2002 and 2003 with providing information on Iran’s nuclear weapons program that revealed the existence of far more sophisticated efforts to enrich uranium than were previously known.

Can ‘terrorists’ be turned into allies?

The group began as a Marxist organization opposed to the Shah of Iran in the 1970s and took part in his overthrow in 1979. But they later broke with the Islamic regime and fled Iran, finding shelter and support from Saddam Hussein during the long Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s.

The MEK mutated into something of a cult of personality, led by the husband and wife team of Masoud and Maryam Rajavi, and U.S. officials says under their leadership it carried out dozens of terrorist attacks inside Iran and elsewhere in the past two decades. The MEK was still in Iraq when U.S.-led forces toppled Saddam in 2003 and is currently under ?protected persons status? ? a special category of the Geneva Convention — in their encampment outside Baghdad.

Nonetheless, the MEK has support in Congress from both the Republican and Democratic side among lawmakers who want the State Department to remove the group’s terrorist label and allow the U.S. to openly cooperate with their efforts to undermine the regime in Tehran. Among those who have called publicly for rehabilitating the MEK are Rep. Gary Ackerman, D-N.Y., Rep. Ilena Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla. and Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo.

Raymond Tanter, a former White House national security aide and Iran specialist at Georgetown University, is among those lobbying for the MEK’s status to be changed. "The enemy of my enemy is my friend," he says.

Tanter, who co-founded a group called the Iran Policy Committee, says that Human Rights Watch has been duped by agents sent by Iran’s government to discredit the MEK.

?It is a humongous mistake for a human rights organization to promote the agenda of a rogue regime by taking at face value the claims of its intelligence agents,? he says. ?Most of the individuals cited in the Human Rights Watch report are agents of the Iranian regime’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security, including Mohammad-Hossein Sobhani," he said.

Sobhani, in the telephone interview from his exile in Europe, denied that charge.

Good Banking Deals

July 2, 2005 0 comments

Canada

Guerrillas claim links to Canada

Iranians captive in Iraq

Canadian government officials visited a former Iranian guerrilla base north of Baghdad last month and met with dozens of detained members of a militant group who say they come from Canada.

After reports U.S. troops were holding several Canadian members of an outlawed faction called Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), Ottawa dispatched two envoys to the group’s headquarters.

Thirty-seven of the MEK members told the officials they were Canadian citizens or landed immigrants, the Department of Foreign Affairs said. In all, 81 are claiming links to Canada, a lawyer said.

Authorities are trying to verify their immigration status. They are being held at Camp Ashraf, which was the MEK’s military headquarters until U.S. forces captured and disarmed it last year.

The MEK is a militant group that has been fighting for more than two decades to overthrow the Iranian government. Saddam Hussein financed the group and gave it a military base for staging attacks against his neighbour.

Thousands of Iranian expatriates made the trek to the camp 100 kilometres west of the Iran-Iraq border to wage war against Tehran’s hardline Islamic regime .Among them were a handful of Canadians.

The camp was disarmed by U.S. troops in June, 2003, and the 4,000 inhabitants are now being detained there by a battalion while the U.S. and Iraqi governments decide their fate. Tehran wants them deported to Iran.

The MEK, or People’s Combatants, is a designated terrorist organization in the United States and Britain but it has not been banned by the Liberal Cabinet, although the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) calls it a "militant Marxist Islamic movement" dedicated to violence.

From Iraq, MEK units conducted scores of cross-border raids, assassinations and bombings in Iran. CSIS has estimated the group has 13 large offices and 170 smaller ones worldwide, including one in Canada.

"The MEK has also evolved into a form of cult, strongly devoted to its chief, [Massoud] Rajavi," says a CSIS report, adding, "The MEK’s 29-year record of behaviour does not substantiate its capability or intention to be democratic."

The MEK presence in Canada came to public attention on April 5, 1992, when about 40 people armed with sticks, crowbars and mallets attacked the Iranian embassy in Ottawa hours after Iranian bombers struck the MEK’s Iraq base.

In 1993, Robab Farahi-Mahdavieh, whom CSIS called a "leading female member of the MEK" and the alleged mastermind of the Ottawa embassy raid, was deported for reasons of national security.

Another MEK leader, Mahnaz Samadi, was arrested in Ottawa in 1999. A CSIS report said she "was responsible for directing some MEK operations in Iraq" and that she was sent to Canada "to act in an organizational capacity."

Shortly after French counterterrorism authorities arrested Maryam Rajavi, the wife of the MEK leader and herself a prominent figure in the movement, Neda Hassani, 25, of Ottawa set herself on fire in protest and died.

U.S. forces who took control of Camp Ashraf last year in a truce agreement seized 300 tanks, 250 armoured personnel carriers, 250 artillery pieces and 10,000 small arms from MEK fighters.

Stewart Bell

June 29, 2005 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq Organization as a terrorist group

Appeals court reinstates terror indictments

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – A federal appeals court reinstated indictments against seven Los Angeles residents accused of raising money for a terror organization with links to ousted Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein.

In a victory for the Bush administration’s war on terror, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday reversed a Los Angeles federal judge who declared the 1996 terror financing law unconstitutional.

The law makes it illegal to funnel money – "material support" – to organizations the State Department says are linked to terrorism, about 30 groups in all.

Before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the government rarely used the terror law. The administration subsequently has used that law to win dozens of terror convictions nationwide, from Lackawanna, N.Y., to Seattle and Portland, Ore.

One legal expert criticized the decision.

"This is a troubling result for a nation that believes in freedom of association," said David Cole, an expert on the law in question at the Georgetown University Law Center.

The case stems from a 2001 indictment against the seven defendants for allegedly providing several hundred thousand dollars to the Mujahedin-e Khalq, which the appeals court said "participated in various terrorist activities against the Iranian regime" and "carried out terrorist activities with the support of Saddam Hussein’s regime."

U.S. District Judge Robert Takasugi invalidated the law, saying it did not provide the groups a proper forum to contest their terror designations.

A three-judge panel of the San Francisco-based federal appeals court overruled that decision and went a step further, saying individuals accused of supporting the listed groups cannot challenge whether the groups should be listed.

The government, the court said, must prove the "fact that a particular organization was designated at the time the material support was given, not whether the government made a correct designation." The decision mirrors a ruling this year by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., upholding the conviction of a man who funneled money to the militant Hezbollah organization while insisting he had a right to challenge that group’s listing.

"The Justice Department is pleased that yet another court has upheld the constitutionality of the material support statute, a key weapon in our arsenal of legal remedies in the war on terror," spokesman John Nowacki said. "Stopping the flow of money and other resources to terrorists is critical to our success, and the department will continue to pursue those who provide material support for terrorist objectives."

The seven Los Angeles defendants said it was a violation of their First Amendment rights to be prohibited from contributing money to groups they say are not terror organizations, and they should be afforded the right to prove the group in question should not be on the State Department’s list.

Writing for the majority, Judge Andrew J. Kleinfeld said the First Amendment did not provide unlimited speech, and even allows limits on campaign contributions.

"It would be anomalous indeed if Congress could prohibit the contribution of money for television commercials saying why a candidate would be a good or bad choice for political office, yet could not prohibit contribution of money to a group designated a terrorist organization," Kleinfeld wrote.

Joining Kleinfeld were Kim McLane Wardlaw and William A. Fletcher.

According to the indictment, the Los Angeles defendants solicited donations at the Los Angeles International Airport and wired money to a Mujahedin-e Khalq bank account in Turkey. The group had unsuccessfully tried to get removed from the terror list.

No court date has been set for the seven.

The case is United States v. Afshari, 02-50355.

By DAVID KRAVETS, AP Legal Affairs Writer – Bakersfield. Com – December 21st, 2004

June 29, 2005 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq Organization as a terrorist group

Humanitarian ruse at L.A. airport raised funds for terrorists

SJ Mercury on Arrests

Humanitarian ruse at L.A. airport raised funds for terrorists, FBI says

SEVEN ARRESTED IN GROUP OPPOSING IRAN GOVERNMENT

BY CHERYL DEVALL

Mercury News Los Angeles Bureau

LOS ANGELES — They stopped travelers in the airport with a humanitarian plea: Help these suffering Iranian children.

But the fundraisers, whose appeals generated at least $1 million, were actually raising cash for an Iranian terrorist organization, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said Wednesday.

FBI investigators said they had arrested seven members of the Mujahedin-e Khalq, a group dedicated to overthrowing the Iranian government. The organization is included on the U.S. State Department’s list of designated terrorist organizations. In recent years, its National Liberation Army has taken credit for armed raids on Iran from bases in neighboring Iraq.

But as they stopped people at Los Angeles International Airport with heart-rending photos of orphaned children, members of the group identified themselves as the Committee for Human Rights in Iran, the FBI said.

And their main fundraising targets, the FBI said, were Asian travelers in the international terminal.

The fundraisers, dressed in business attire and carrying binders filled with photos of alleged atrocities against Iranian children, asked for donations of up to $500.

“Their belief was that Asian travelers would be more likely to make donations than people of other ethnic backgrounds,” said FBI spokesman Matthew McLaughlin.

The Committee for Human Rights in Iran was making $5,000 to $10,000 a day from these airport solicitations, according to FBI affidavits filed with a federal magistrate. The group also aggressively solicited members of Los Angeles’ large Iranian-American community, FBI representatives said.

“This money was used to buy arms, such as mortars and rocket-propelled grenades,” said James DeSarno of the FBI’s Los Angeles office.

“There is no evidence in our investigation that anyone who was solicited was knowledgeable of where the funds were going.”

The Mujahedin-e Khalq has opposed Iranian governments from that of the late Shah Reza Pahlavi to the present regime of the Ayatollah Khamenei. It has been involved, the FBI said, in several actions against American targets, including the 1979 U.S. embassy takeover in Tehran and a 1992 occupation of the Iranian mission to the United Nations in New York.

Germany’s federal criminal police tipped off U.S. law enforcement to the organization’s alleged money laundering in 1997, according to the affidavit.

“None of the money they raised went to humanitarian purposes,” FBI spokesman McLaughlin said.

But so far, the FBI has not been able to connect the money raised in this country to specific terrorist acts. They have traced $1 million to two accounts in Turkish banks. Of that, $400,000 was sent to a used auto parts store in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Beyond that, the money trail “may be rather difficult to discern, given the cultural and geographical barriers we’d have to overcome,” McLaughlin said.

He added that the investigation is continuing beyond the arrests of seven people believed to be leaders of the Mujahedin-e Khalq in Los Angeles.

The arrests were made Tuesday in locations throughout the city’s West side; the group’s alleged ringleader, Tahmineh Tahamtan, was picked up at a Starbucks coffee shop.

The Committee for Human Rights in Iran had the appropriate permits to solicit funds in public places. Those permits required proof of state and federal tax-exempt status, said Tammy Catania, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Police Commission, which issues the permits. Those permits do not require police background checks, Catania said.

It is not clear why the solicitors singled out Asian tourists. Officials at several tour companies catering to Asians said Tuesday they’d never heard complaints about airport fundraisers.

Neither had the Japanese consulate in Los Angeles. Spokesman Yasushi Fujii, who spent eight years in Iran, could only speculate that perhaps “Iran had a kind of sympathy for the Japanese because they fought a war with America.”

The Mujahedin-e Khalq, which mixes Islam with socialism, has never had a large following in the United States, said Salam Al-Marayati, director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, a lobbying organization with offices in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.

The group splintered from the Islamic opposition to the Shah in the late 1970s, he said. “It’s always puzzled people as to exactly what their ideology is.”

The group has been raising money in airports for about 20 years, said Al-Marayati, who said he has been approached by the fundraisers more than once while at domestic terminals in Washington and Los Angeles. Before the group’s appearance on the State Department terrorist list, the solicitors identified themselves as representatives of Mujahedin-e Khalq, not as the Committee for Human Rights in Iran, he said.

“They have these notebooks of pictures and you don’t know where the pictures are from. They just tell you these are pictures of dying children,” he said. “I oppose giving people money based on pictures.”

Because he’s of Iraqi descent, he said, the solicitors thought he might be sympathetic to them. But when he asked where the money would go, they offered no answer, Al-Marayati said.

Whether their fundraising benefited terrorist activities, he added, “will be up to the courts to decide.”

June 26, 2005 0 comments

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