This edition of the program is about the MKO terrorist organization and the West’s support for the group. The program discusses the fundamental cultic roots of the group, their modus operandi, dynamics, western support for them, and their current status in Albania.
Albanian historian and journalist Olsi Jazexhi (L) and journalist Syed Mohsin Abbas (R) join Press TV’s News Review program on July 10, 2021 to discuss the upcoming annual meeting of the anti-Iran Mujahedin-e-Khalq Organization (MKO) terrorist group.
An Albanian historian and journalist tells Press TV that Israel’s secret services use the anti-Iran Mujahedin-e-Khalq Organization (MKO or MEK) terrorist group to impair Iran’s security and to pressure the Islamic Republic to end its support for Palestine.
“The thing is that the MEK is being used by Israeli secret services and certain groups in the United States to harass the security of Iran,” Olsi Jazexhi said in an interview with Press TV’s News Review program on Saturday, ahead of the annual meeting of the terrorist group, which is usually attended by top US officials.
“Many of the people who are going to speak in their conference today are die-hard Israeli Zionists – people who support Israel and want the extinction of the Palestinian people,” Jazexhi said, noting that the MKO is being used as a tool to pressure Iran to stop its support for Palestine.
He maintained that the MKO needs a big budget for its survival, which “we suspect comes from Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates.”
He also described the MKO as a “cultish organization” that keeps slave soldiers, including the prisoners of Iraq’s imposed war on Iran in the 1980s, during which the group joined forces with former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to massacre Iranians.
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According to the Albanian journalist, the group organizes money laundering and human trafficking in Europe, in addition to its gross human rights violations against its members.
“They are surviving, but this is their last breath,” he said, adding that in spite of the group’s campaign of death and destruction against the Islamic Republic, “they cannot do anything to Iran” as a powerful, independent country.
After it was founded more than 50 years ago, the MKO launched a campaign of bombings and assassinations in Iran. Out of the nearly 17,000 Iranians killed in terrorist attacks over the past four decades, about 12,000 have fallen victim to the group’s acts of terror.
The ill-famed terror group is currently based in Albania, where it enjoys freedom of activity after being delisted by the European Union and the United States in 2009 and 2012 respectively.
Regardless of its disrepute around the world, the MKO has in recent years held numerous big events, attended by senior American, Israeli and Saudi officials, including former US Senator John McCain, former mayor of New York City Rudy Giuliani, former US national security advisor John Bolton, former US Senator Joe Lieberman, and former director of Saudi Arabia’s intelligence agency Turki bin Faisal Al Saud.
‘Fakhrizadeh assassination said to have MKO involvement’
During the News Review program, journalist Syed Mohsin Abbas also told Press TV that the high-profile assassination of Iran’s nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh last year is said to have had MKO involvement along with Israel’s Mossad spy agency.
“The MEK have no credibility in Iran. They’ve been carrying out these assassinations even to this day, even the assassination of the nuclear scientist Fakhrizadeh is said to have had MEK involvement along with Mossad,” he said.
Abbas said the MKO is effectively an extension of the “Anglo-Zionist deep state,” and is basically involved in only killing, murdering and maiming Iranians.
He also criticized Western countries’ hypocrisy in supporting the terrorist group, saying, “I think that the rest of the world, which gets cowed by American vetoes, by American sanctions, need to really grow a backbone” to come to terms with such hypocrisy.
“One would hope that such terrorist organization should be pulled up by the international community instead of being the absolute hypocrites that the Western regimes have shown themselves to be in case of MEK,” he said.
He added that the West is funding the MKO, helping them with their planning, and also giving them intelligence to carry out their operations.
‘All Western states support MKO’
Mohammad Marandi, a professor of international studies at the University of Tehran, also told Press TV that the MKO receives support from all Western countries – including Canada, the United States, the EU and Australia – rather than just some European countries.
“All of them support this terrorist organization. Just as they supported al-Qaeda in Syria and ISIS (Daesh) in Syria, these countries have been supporting terrorists that have been active in Iran,” Marandi said.
He explained that when the MKO began its bombing campaign in Iran in the early 1980s, they had offices in Europe, in France in particular, and when they joined Saddam Hussein’s army and became a part of his military, they gained even further support from Western regimes.
“The MEK terrorist organization receives funding from European governments and the United States, and the murders … they carry out and the espionage they carry out are fully backed by Western regimes,” the Iranian professor stressed.
He also maintained that one should not focus on the participation of certain American officials, including Bolton, when analyzing the group’s links to the US.
“There’s no difference between Bolton and [Barack] Obama,” he remarked. “They are all the same. They all support terrorism. They all support killing Iranians. They all support regime change [in Tehran].”
The People’s Mujahedin Organization of Iran, known better by its acronym the MKO, is a terrorist group responsible for the deaths of thousands of Iranian civilians.
Over the past four decades, the group has been committed to overthrowing the Islamic Republic of Iran through every possible means.
The notorious group sided with Saddam Hussein during Iraq’s war with Iran in the 1980s, but fell out of favor with Baghdad after he was toppled by a US-led invasion in 2003.
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Since then, the group has desperately been looking for a new rich godfather for survival. Over the last few years, the terrorist group has developed close relations with the deep-pocket Saudis.
The two sides have done little to hide their ties. Quite the contrary, every now and then, they seek to flaunt their romance, in one way or another.
Hassan Zadeh Zine el-Abidine; one of MEK victims : They fired twelve bullets in my back
Hassan is 47. He lives alone in a modest neighborhood in Isfahan, in southern Iran. He gets around by wheelchair since 1980.in that year, a member of the Mojahedin shot him several times in the back. He never recovered.
As he described it:” At the time, I was a simple worker in a mosaic workshop. In the evening, toward eight o clock, I was on my way home. I parked my car and had taken a few steps toward my house when a gunman, hidden in the dark, fired at me from point blank range. I had no time to react. From the first bullet wound, I was on the ground. The gunman, who had two revolvers, riddled my body with twelve shots. He emptied them both in me.”
Hassan was treated for several months in Tehran Hospital. He was lucky: many other people shot by the Mojahedin did not survive. His disability has not kept him from his studies. With his degree in Theology, he teaches at Isfahan’s Teacher Training College.
Hassan remembers:” it was during the first months of the revolution. Everybody was involved. but I was no more active than many others. And I had not joined any political party”. He sill cannot understand why the Mojahedin chose him as a target. His assailant was arrested soon thereafter in Sabzebar, in Khoram province in northeastern Iran. He was tried and executed. Hassan states:” I would have liked so much to hear him explain why he did it”.
Why did the Mojahedin choose violence? Hassan’s philosophical answer: “They could not take power through peaceful and democratic means in a system of universal suffrage. No human being can agree with the violent strategy they adopted”.
From the book: The People’s Mojahedin of Iran: A Struggle for what? “By Victor Charbonnier
The spokesman of Iran’s government called the martyrdom of the then Chief Justice of Iran, Ayatollah Seyyed Mohammas Hossein Beheshti, a symbol of the assassination of justice and the chemical bombardment of Sardasht as a symbol of the assassination of security.
Iran Press/ Iran news: In his weekly presser on Tuesday, Ali Rabiei said: “In the last four decades, the enemies of Iran have launched a large-scale offensive to assassinate the three fundamental valuable principles; justice, security, and freedom of our nation.”
Rabiei called the assassination of martyr Beheshti a symbol of the assassination of justice.
His remarks were on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of a deadly attack by the anti-Iran Mujahedin-e-Khalq Organization (MKO) terrorist group, which killed some Iranian officials, including the then-head of Supreme Judicial Council Ayatollah Mohammad Beheshti.
On June 28, 1981, a powerful bomb exploded at Iran’s Islamic Republican Party (IRP) headquarters, where the party’s leaders held a meeting.
the MEK bombed the headquarters of the Islamic Republic Party in 1981
The bombing killed scores of Iranian officials, including Ayatollah Beheshti.
The MKO has admitted to having carried out the attack.
In a meeting with General Taher Haboush (Saddam’s intelligence chief) in 1999, the then-head of MKO Masoud Rajavi said: “As you know, I was in Paris from 1981 to 1986. We were not called terrorists in those years. Although they knew who had blown up the Republican Party in Iran … they knew who and what political process killed the president and prime minister of the regime while we were in contact with both the White House and the Elysee Palace. They knew well, but they did not call us terrorists at all.”
The MKO has made numerous terrorist attacks against Iranian civilians and government officials since the victory of the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979. Out of the nearly 17,000 Iranians killed in terrorist attacks over the past four decades, about 12,000 have fallen victim to the terrorist group’s acts of terror.
Washington and the European Union have removed the MKO from their lists of terrorist organizations. The anti-Iran terrorists enjoy the freedom of activity in the US and Europe and even hold meetings with officials from the US and EU.
Chemical bombing of Sardasht
Commemorating the anniversary of the chemical bombing of Sardasht, the spokesman of Iran’s government called the event a symbol of the assassination of security, saying that it was not limited to it and continued with the support of terrorist groups inside and outside Iran against the security of this nation, and with the cowardly assassination of Martyr Lt. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, they made yet another symbol of it.
The chemical attack took place on June 28, 1987, in the northwestern province of West Azarbaijan. The Iraqi warplanes dropped chemical bombs on four residential areas, which resulted in the killing of over 100 citizens and injury of 8000.
Iran’s top official explained further to call economic sanctions a symbol of the assassination of the third valuable principle: freedom, which means freedom from poverty and freedom from fear of losing the right to an honorable and dignified life.
“Of course, we have never surrendered to these evil forces of terrorism and the malicious intentions behind it, and we have no intention of surrendering,” highlighted Rabiei.
The government spokesman said: “Today, those Western nations who have granted asylum to the perpetrators of the assassination of Martyr Beheshti and other martyrs of that terrorist incident, and by supporting Saddam Hussein and equipping him with chemical weapons, must apologize to the Iranian people and answer for these crimes.”
Furthermore, in recent years, he said that by imposing inhumane sanctions which have endangered the livelihoods of millions of innocent Iranian citizens.
“However, today, we see that not only are they not remorseful, but they still insist on continuing economic sanctions and unjustly harassing our people,” the spokesman added.
He stated: “This dark background is enough to understand the roots of Iran’s distrust of the West, especially the United States.”
Rabiei added: “On the anniversary of the martyrdom of Martyr Beheshti and the chemical attack on Sardasht and the martyrdom of hundreds of other innocent people, we urge all Western governments, especially the US government, to reconsider past wrongdoing and make up for it, which at its starting point is only to end sanctions against our people’s economy. We call on them to take a step in the right direction to end the forty years of fruitless terror of freedom, liberty, and independence of a proud nation.”
Iranpress
The Association for Defending Victims of Terrorism (ADVT) organized an event on “the legal capacities and the benefits of human rights” on Monday on the sidelines of the 47th session of the United Nations Human Rights Council.
Iran Press/ Iran News: The event, held in Tehran, coincides with the 40th anniversary of a deadly attack by the anti-Iran Mujahedin-e-Khalq Organization (MKO) terrorist group, which killed some Iranian officials, including the then-head of Supreme Judicial Council Ayatollah Mohammad Beheshti.
Zohreh Elahian, the chairwoman of the Iranian parliament’s human rights committee, said at the event that despite what was stated in international conventions, including the 1951 Geneva Convention, the MKO terrorist group that has killed many innocent people continues its acts of sabotage against the Iranian nation with the support of Western countries.
“According to international conventions, terrorists must prevent to be the asylum, and granting asylum to MKO is a violation of human rights by the Western countries,” she added.
On June 28, 1981, a powerful bomb exploded at Iran’s Islamic Republican Party (IRP) headquarters, where the party’s leaders held a meeting.
The bombing killed scores of Iranian officials, including Ayatollah Beheshti.
The MKO has admitted to having carried out the attack.
In a meeting with General Taher Haboush (Saddam’s intelligence chief) in 1999, the then-head of MKO Masoud Rajavi said: “As you know, I was in Paris from 1981 to 1986. We were not called terrorists in those years. Although they knew who had blown up the Republican Party in Iran … they knew who and what political process killed the president and prime minister of the regime while we were in contact with both the White House and the Elysee Palace. They knew well, but they did not call us terrorists at all.”
The MKO has made numerous terrorist attacks against Iranian civilians and government officials since the victory of the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979. Out of the nearly 17,000 Iranians killed in terrorist attacks over the past four decades, about 12,000 have fallen victim to the terrorist group’s acts of terror.
Washington and the European Union have removed the MKO from their lists of terrorist organizations. The anti-Iran terrorists enjoy the freedom of activity in the US and Europe and even hold meetings with officials from the US and EU.
Mohammad-Reza Kolahi was a member of the People’s Mujahedin of Iran (MEK) that was responsible for planting a bomb at the headquarters of the Islamic Republican Party (IRP) Party in Tehran in which 72 high-ranking politicians and party members were killed in 1981.
In 2015, in the Netherlands, Mohamad Reza Kolahi was killed by a criminal gang on the order of MEK. Two Amsterdam criminals have been jailed for the 2015 murder of Kolahi Samadi, who lived in the Netherlands hiding behind the false name of Ali Motamed.
Massoud Khodabande writes his experience with Kolahi as:” I knew Kolahi personally. I received him in Kurdistan when he ran away from Iran. (I had transferred a 10 KW radio transmitter and other American made transceivers from Munich to MEK bases just outside Sardasht city and was there to undertake the assembly and commissioning). He worked with me for the next two years (he was an undergraduate Electronics Engineering student) and was then moved to maintenance work at Rajavi’s Camp Ashraf (Saddam’s private army) near Baghdad.
I knew then that he was not a member of MEK or even remotely connected to their ideology when he came to me, and I knew later in Iraq that he could never accept the cultish teachings of Rajavi thereafter (the Ideological Revolution, divorces …), and would remain an outcast with nowhere to go. And this is what happened. Whether he was fooled by MEK to carry out this terrorist act, or whether he was pushed directly by other intelligence agencies which pulled MEK wires in Tehran at that time is a mystery to me. But what is clear is that although he was not a person close to MEK, the task of taking him out of Iran and saving him (and at the same time confining him) was the job assigned to the MEK.
It is inconceivable that Kolahi, with the information that he had, and the danger he could pose to the MEK and their variety of masters if brought in front of a camera, would go to the Netherlands, get married, get a job and start a new life without the help and the blessing of the MEK (Maryam Rajavi). It is also inconceivable that the MEK (or their masters) would have not have a 24/7 control of every aspect of his life (including every telephone conversation) and simply let him go unmonitored.”
Although supporters of Ayatollah Khomeini had never sympathized with MEK elements, MEK’s enmity with the newly established government in Iran became acute when the head of this group was banned from running for presidential elections, which was followed by a heavy MEK loss at parliamentary elections in 1981. It was then that MEK started its terrorist activities in Iran; they bombed the headquarters of the Islamic Republic Party, which had won both the presidency and the parliament in landslide victories. The bomb killed Mohammad Beheshti, Head of Iran’s Judicial System who was also the party leader, as well as four cabinet ministers, plus 24 members of Parliament along with 43 other government officials and party members.
the MEK bombed the headquarters of the Islamic Republic Party in 1981
The MKO – listed as a terrorist organization by much of the international community – fled Iran in 1986 for Iraq and was given a camp by former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
They fought on the side of Saddam during the Iraqi imposed war on Iran (1980-88). They were also involved in the bloody repression of Shiite Muslims in southern Iraq in 1991 and the massacre of Iraqi Kurds.
The notorious group is also responsible for killing thousands of Iranian civilians and officials after the victory of the Islamic revolution in 1979.
More than 17,000 Iranians, many of them civilians, have been killed at the hands of the MKO in different acts of terrorism including bombings in public places, and targeted killings.
The MKO also had a hand in the massacre of Kurds following the crushing of a 1991 uprising by Shiites in Iraq’s south and Kurds in the north, which was one of the most brutal acts of repression under Saddam Hussein.
Forty years ago, on 20 June 1981, the Mujahedin Khalq Organization (MKO/ MEK/ PMOI/ Cult of Rajavi) organized a mass protest of allegedly half a million people –mostly young untrained students– in Tehran, with the aim of triggering a second revolution. They had been ordered by the group leader, Massoud Rajavi to physically clash with any so-called agent of the Islamic Republic. This was actually the start of MEK’s armed struggle against not only the Iranian government but also the Iranian people.
Since the date, MEK has carried out a large number of terror attacks and assassinations in Iran, including one in 1981 that killed 70, among them, Iran’s president and premier. Only from 26 August 1981 to December 1982, the MEK conducted 336 terrorist attacks against civilian targets or government officials in Iran.
Actually, the group firstly tried to make social and political space inside Iran but it failed to obtain any success. So, they changed the orientation to the terrorist acts against Iranian nation. Over the following months and years, the violence escalated.
However, MEK has always glorified the date, during the past years. This year, Maryam Rajavi launched a huge propaganda show in her headquarters in Albania to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the start of a nationwide violence and bloodshed against her own country fellowmen.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry summoned the British ambassador to Tehran to voice protest at the problems that Iranian expatriates in the UK encountered as they wanted to attend the presidential election at the Islamic Republic’s diplomatic missions.
Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Saeed Khatibzadeh said on Saturday that UK Ambassador Rob Macaire has been summoned by the ministry in protest at the problems faced by the Iranian voters residing in England.
He said the British envoy has been notified of Iran’s strong protest at the “riotous and terrorist” conduct of a number of “anti-Revolution terrorist elements and those opposing democracy” who have disrupted the process of the 13th Iranian presidential election in a number of cities such as London and Birmingham by insulting the voters and the executive personnel and the assault and battery against one of the voters.
“The British ambassador has been told that the government and police of that country (UK) have failed to fulfil their duties to ensure the security of the polling stations and the voters,” Khatibzadeh said.
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The spokesman also noted that the Foreign Ministry officials have reminded the UK envoy that democracy materializes at the ballot boxes not in the moves of a few number of rioters on the streets.
“In the meeting, strong criticism has been leveled at the naughty and divisive performance of the UK-based Persian media, including BBC Persian and Iran International, which tried to promote a boycott of election, encourage people to attend street protests, and disrupt the process of election with their programs and types of news making. It was emphasized that such measures that run counter to democracy and encourage riotous moves will remain in the memory of Iranian people,” he added.
The British ambassador has pledged to convey the protest to London.
There are reports that a number of anti-Revolution forces in the foreign states have harassed and attacked the Iranian expats attending the presidential election in the polling stations abroad.
An Iranian woman in England’s Birmingham reportedly suffered injuries to her head in an attack as she was going to the polling place to vote.
