Iran has condemned the removal of the MKO/PMOI terrorist group from the European Union’s terror list. Earlier today, Iran’s Ambassador to Azerbaijan Naser Hamidi Zare’ said that exclusion of the group from the list was a new Western trap for the Islamic state, accusing the West of operating a policy of double-standards in dealing with terrorist groups.
A Russian scholar said the European Union (EU) manipulated such issues as terrorism and human rights for its own political purposes. Talking to IRNA here on Saturday, Ludmila Kulagina, as a top researcher in the Russian Institute of Oriental Studies, criticized the recent EU move in removing the terrorist Mojahedeen Khalq Organization (MKO) form its terrorism list.
we remain mindful of the MeK’s[PMOI/MKO] history as an organisation responsible for a number of serious terrorist attacks—it claimed responsibility for large numbers of violent attacks inside Iran for a number of years, including 96 in a three-month period in early 2001. We do not agree with its claim that it represents a credible democratic opposition in exile.
On Wednesday 11th of Feb 2009, a group of separated veteran members of the PMOI had a meeting with the authorities of Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in PARIS and they submitted a letter regarding their concerns about psychological pressures and an imposed unlimited hunger strike upon the residents of ASHRAF garrison by PMOI leaders and operatives.
Intelligence Minister underlining his affiliated ministry’s capability to monitor Mojaheddin Khalq Organization (MKO) activities inside or outside Iran, said that MKO is too weak to create any problem for the country.
… They never yielded to the will of the Iranian people.”He adds that this”terrorist gang”participated with Saddam in his war against its own people and in the war against the Sunnah and Shi’i in Kurdistan and the southern Iraqi cities. He goes on to say that”this gang[PMOI/MKO/MEK] is now begging the foreign forces to save them and keep them alive.”..
British Foreign Secretary David Miliband made clear his country’s position on the terrorist nature of the MKO grouplet had not changed, despite the European Union’s controversial decision to remove the MKO from the terror list, IRNA reported…Miliband’s latest comments on the MKO came in the wake of earlier statements by Larijani who in his address to the Munich security confab on Friday voiced outrage over the West’s harboring of known terrorist groups, alluding to European countries providing safe haven to the MKO.
the European Union (EU) delisted the terrorist Mojahedeen Khalq Organization (MKO) only to exploit it in line with its own interests. Member of Majlis National Security and Foreign Policy Commission Javad Jahangirzadeh said the members of the terrorist MKO/PMOI/MEK will continue to serve their new European masters just the way they did for the toppled Saddam Hussein in Iraq for a long time.
… The committee in charge of ending the presence of the terrorist Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization [MKO] in Iraq has held a periodic meeting under National Security Adviser Dr Muwaffaq al-Rubay’i and in the presence of the minister of human rights and the US ambassador to Iraq. Al-Rubay’i stressed the need to expel this organization from Iraq …
al-Rubai went on to say that Iraqi courts have issued arrest warrants for 14 MKO members…“The MKO[PMOI/MEK] is a terrorist group and a cancerous tumor in Iraq; The crimes and sins the group has committed are evident and well-documented. Several thousand Iraqi citizens have fallen victims of the terrorist organization and we have provable evidence, that we will submit them to Iraqi courts,” said al-Rubai in an exclusive interview with IRNA.