Iran Diplomat Lands in Jail for Paris Bomb Plot

Iran

February 4th, 11:30am

Asharq Al-Awsat

Heavily armed policemen patrol outside the courthouse during the trial of four persons including an Iranian diplomate and Belgian-Iranian couple before the Antwerp criminal court in Antwerp, on February 4, 2021. (Photo by DIRK WAEM / BELGA / AFP)

A Belgian court convicted an Iranian diplomat Thursday of masterminding a thwarted 2018 bombing of an exiled opposition rally outside Paris and ordered him jailed for 20 years. Assadollah Assadi, now 49, was attached to the Iranian mission in Austria when he supplied explosives for the planned attack. After the attack was foiled, he was arrested in Germany in July 2018, where he was deemed not to be able to claim diplomatic immunity. Three accomplices, dual Iranian-Belgians, were given jail terms of between 15 and 18 years and stripped of their Belgian citizenship. The June 30, 2018 gathering in Villepinte, near Paris, included senior leaders of the exiled National Council of Resistance in Iran (NCRI) and some high-profile supporters including former US president Donald Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani. Assadi was tried in the Belgian port city of Antwerp along with the three co-accused who were also arrested after police foiled the plot. Assadi did not attend Thursday's hearing at the courthouse. The diplomat was charged with "attempted murders of a terrorist nature" and "taking part in the activity of a terrorist group.” Belgian-Iranian couple Nasimeh Naami, 36, and Amir Saadouni, 40, accepted from Assadi a half-kilo 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. Belgian officers halted the couple's car with the bomb on board on the day of the event, preventing what the NCRI's lawyers said would have been a "bloodbath". Later that year, the French government accused Iran's intelligence service of being behind the operation. The case stirred tensions between European powers and Tehran, and was seized upon by NCRI supporters to press their case against the Iranian regime. "It is the regime in its entirety which is being judged in this trial -- it is about state terrorism," the group's leader Maryam Rajavi told AFP before the verdict. A note from Belgium’s intelligence and security agency seen by The Associated Press identified Assadi as an officer of Iran’s intelligence and security ministry who operated under cover at Iran’s embassy in Vienna. Belgium’s state security officers said he worked for the ministry’s so-called Department 312, the directorate for internal security, which is on the European Union’s list of organizations regarded as terrorist.

from Asharq AL-awsat https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/2784781/iran-diplomat-lands-jail-paris-bomb-plot