Assadolah Assadi
ANTWERP, Feb 5 (NNN-AGENCIES) — A Belgian court has convicted an Iranian diplomat for plotting a thwarted 2018 bombing of an exiled opposition group outside the French capital, Paris, and ordered him jailed for 20 years.
Belgian prosecution lawyers and civil parties to the prosecution on Thursday said the Vienna-based diplomat, Assadolah Assadi, was guilty of attempted “terrorism” after a plot to bomb a rally of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) in June 2018 was foiled by German, French and Belgian police.
“The ruling shows two things: A diplomat doesn’t have immunity for criminal acts … and the responsibility of the Iranian state in what could have been carnage,” Belgian prosecution lawyer Georges-Henri Beauthier told reporters outside the court in Antwerp.
The ruling marked the first trial of an Iranian official for suspected “terrorism” in the European Union since Iran’s revolution in 1979.
Assadi, now 49, was attached to the Iranian mission in Austria when he supplied explosives for the planned attack. He was arrested in Germany, where he did not have diplomatic immunity.
Three accomplices were given jail terms and were stripped of their Belgian citizenship.
Belgian-Iranian couple Nasimeh Naami, 36, and Amir Saadouni, 40, accepted from Assadi half a kilogramme of TATP explosives and a detonator.
Naami received an 18-year sentence and Saadouni 15 years.
Belgium-based Iranian poet Mehrdad Arefani was an accomplice of Assadi’s who had been due to guide the couple at the rally. He was jailed for 17 years.
The June 30, 2018 gathering in Villepinte, near Paris, included senior leaders of the exiled NCRI, which was formed with the aim of regime change in Iran. The group counts Mujahedin-e-Khalq, or MEK, as a key member.
Tehran says European states harbour MEK, which it deems a “terrorist” organisation. The group was on the United States’s “terrorism list” from 1997 to 2012, but its rallies in recent years have been headlined by the likes of former US President Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani and former US National Security Advisor John Bolton.
Reporters and members of the public were not allowed into the courtroom, which was heavily guarded by police and armoured vehicles, with police helicopters overhead.
One of the defence lawyers said he would recommend an appeal, although it was not clear if Assadi would do so.
Iran has denied involvement in the foiled plot, calling such a claim a “shallow fabrication”. — NNN-AGENCIES
