Unveiling the Shadows of Iranian Terrorism at a Madrid Press Conference
Madrid, 23 February 2024 – In an emotionally charged press conference held at the Madrid Press Club (Asociación de la Prensa de Madrid), Dr. Alejo Vidal-Quadras, President of the International Committee in Search of Justice (ISJ) and former Vice President of the European Parliament, recounted the chilling details of the assassination attempt on his life for the first time before a standing room only audience. The attack, which occurred on November 9, 2023, and left him gravely injured after being shot in the face, is widely believed to have been orchestrated by operatives linked to the Iranian regime. Dr. Vidal-Quadras provided a compelling narrative of the events leading up to the attack and shared his immediate conviction that the Iranian regime was the orchestrator behind this heinous act.
“Let them listen to me in Tehran: They have not achieved their goal, I miraculously survived, and I intend to continue this fight for the rest of my life; even with more motivation, more energy, more enthusiasm and more dedication than I have had so far, which has been a lot,” Dr. Vidal-Quadras said defiantly.
Excerpts from his remarks follow:
Hello everyone. I’m sorry that my voice is not quite as good as the aftermath of the attack and the shooting I have been able to recover from، but in the last few weeks it has been much better even though my voice has never been so smooth and innocent، but now it’s a bit more difficult. In addition, I’m still improving facial muscle tissue, which still takes time, making it a little more difficult to speak.
First of all, I want to thank you so much for participating in this press conference. I was planning to hold this conference as soon as I could, and the reality was that I needed a lot of time to be able to be in a position to answer your questions.
This is case is in the hands of the National Court and is still under a confidential process. So all that I will say here is entirely and exclusively my responsibility as the judicial process is taking its course, and the police investigation continues.
As you know several people have been arrested. A fellow on the other side of the Atlantic was arrested on the border between Colombia and Venezuela.
What I am going to do is give you a picture of the circumstances of the attack in the current political situation as to what motivated this terrorist attack against me personally.
Why do I think the Iranian dictatorship decided to attack me?
“I am not surprised that the mullahs have decided to get rid of me. For more than two decades, I have been actively involved in the promotion of democracy and human rights in Iran and have publicly challenged the totalitarian and fundamentalist regime of Iran.
“During my 15 years in the European Parliament as vice-president, I was the honorary president of the informal group Friends of a Free Iran, founded in 2003 by a Portuguese socialist MP, Paolo Casaca, and a British Conservative MP, Struan Stevenson. The three of us led many campaigns and fought successfully to get the European Parliament adopt resolutions supporting human rights in Iran.
“We decided to work to change the policy of appeasement pursued by the European Union and the United States.
“I also established the international Committee for Justice (ISJ) in 2008 to coordinate its activities with many politicians in Europe and other countries, especially the United States, to help the Iranian democratic opposition. ISJ has become a very important factor in raising awareness about human rights abuses in Iran and the mullahs’ destructive role in exporting Islamic fundamentalism. It has exposed the regime’s terrorist meddling in the region, in addition to its relentless pursuit of nuclear weapons.
“I must point out that as a former professor of nuclear physics, I have attended several conferences on the Iranian nuclear threat and have produced documentary reports on this issue in ISJ. I have also spoken about Iran in numerous meetings and conferences. Millions of Iranians inside and outside Iran know my name and my commitment to a free Iran.
“This has made me the target of the mullahs. I am proud to be in this position and I do not regret for a moment what I have done to help the people of Iran who want to establish a democratic and secular republic in their country. Rather, I will increase my efforts today with more determination than ever before, motivated with greater determination to establish democracy and freedom in Iran.
“The Iranian regime published a blacklist on 16 October 2022. I was number one on that list along with several MEPs. The ISJ was also included as an entity. The President of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, reacted strongly and cancelled all official interactions between the European Parliament and Iran until further notice.
“Six days before the assassination attempt, the Spanish-language television of the Iranian regime—HispanTV—referred to me as a supporter of the “Zionist colonial occupation” and “racism and genocide” in Gaza, a completely delusional accusation that every one of you know has no basis in reality.
“On the evening of my assassination attempt, we saw a tweet: “Statement by the Iranian Embassy in Madrid condemning terrorism,” but instead of mentioning me or any news of the attempted assassination, they repeated their usual remarks that the regime was the main victim of terrorism by the Iranian opposition, an example of extreme cynicism.
“My message to our government and the European Union is to actively work to dismantle the Iranian regime’s terrorist networks in Europe and not to succumb to any hostage blackmail Iran actively exerts against Western governments.
“We must follow the European Parliament’s repeated demands, including the last resolution adopted two weeks ago on February 8, to place the Iranian regime’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) on the EU terrorist list. The IRGC is not only waging war in the Middle East, but it is also the main tool of repression inside Iran. It kills hundreds of protestors and continues to torture and imprison dissidents. Therefore, it must be blacklisted because It both helps our security in Europe and helps the Iranian people live in a democracy.
“I call on the Spanish government and the European Union to close the embassies of the Iranian regime responsible for coordinating these crimes and expel its ambassadors and officials.”
Brief History of Iranian Regime Terrorism
Dr. Vidal Quadras also spoke extensively about the history of the Iranian regime’s extraterritorial terrorism.
He said in part:
The Iranian regime, the theocratic dictatorship ruling Iran, has been actively involved in terrorism since its inception more than 40 years ago. Whether against Iranian citizens or against its foreign opponents. This is separate from the severe and extremely horrific repression within the country. These overseas high number of murders have occurred in Europe. But the regime has also tried to do it in the United States.
Since its inception, the Iranian regime has actively applied terrorism against Iranian dissidents and foreign citizens, while maintaining domestic repression through executions and torture inside Iran.
These extraterritorial killings, which number in the hundreds, have occurred in many European, Asian and American countries for most of the past four decades.
In the early years, the Iranian regime used its elite forces for this purpose. One example is the assassination of Professor Kazem Rajavi, Iran’s first ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva after the fall of the Shah’s regime, who had split from the regime and joined the resistance. He was murdered outside his Geneva home in April 1990.
For a better explanation, I read the press release issued by Swiss Federal Investigators on June 22, 1990:
“The execution of Mr. Kazem Rajavi was carefully planned. For this reason, the commandos moved to our country in October 1989, and then in late January 2011 and finally between 30 and 13 April 2011. At this last stage, the perpetrators of the incident saw his victim renting a car in the city. Geneva and Lausanne were on several occasions before the operation on April 24, 1990, shortly before the operation was carried out. By noon.
‘”Thirteen people involved all identified themselves with Iranian service passports, citing “missions”. Some of these identification documents were issued on the same dates in Tehran. Most of these people arrived in Switzerland on direct flights from Iran Air to Geneva and had airline tickets with consecutive serial numbers. In addition, they all stayed in or around hotels in Geneva.”
At this stage, investigators have gathered various evidence that a number of Iranian official services were directly involved in Mr. Rajavi’s murder. Police investigations show that two diplomats appointed by the victim’s brother were in Geneva during the crime and left Iran Air to Tehran on the day of the murder.
The assassinations continued throughout the 1990s in several European capitals, such as the assassination of former Iranian Prime Minister Shapur Bakhtiar in Paris in 1991, Abdorrahman Qassemlou, an Iranian dissident in Vienna in 1989, and diplomat and opposition representative of the National Council of Resistance in Italy, Mohammad Hossein Naghdi, who was shot by a motorcyclist a hundred metres from his Rome office in 1993 in broad daylight.
But with the famous “Mykonos murders” of Iranian Kurdish leaders at a restaurant in Berlin in 1992, things changed completely. The Berlin court determined that the orders were issued by Tehran’s top officials. This led to a series of significant decisions by the European Union that had serious implications for the Iranian regime.
On 10 April 1997, the Presidency of the Council of the European Union declared:
- In the findings of the Berlin Supreme Court of Justice in the case known as the Mykonos case, the involvement of Iranian authorities was at the highest level.
- The European Union condemns this interference by the Iranian authorities and considers such behaviour completely unacceptable in international affairs.
- The EU has always wanted a constructive relationship with Iran and its critical dialogue agreed in December 1992 at the European Council designed to advance this goal. However, as long as Iran breaks international norms and engages in acts of terrorism, no progress will be made.
- The presidency invited member states to withdraw their ambassadors for coordinated consultations on the EU’s future relationship with Iran.
- And on April 29 of the same year, the EU announced the following:
- The Council determined to fight terrorism in all its forms, regardless of its perpetrators or motives, agreed as follows:
- Affirming that there is no basis for continuing critical dialogue between the EU and Iran in the current situation.
- Suspension of official bilateral visits of ministers to or from Iran under current circumstances.
- Confirmation of the policy set by EU member states not to send weapons to Iran.
- Ensure that the visa is not granted to Iranians with information and security duties.
- Coordination for the expulsion of Iranian intelligence personnel from EU member states.
With the departure of the European Union’s ambassadors from Tehran and the expulsion of all Iranian agents from its territory, we witnessed a period of almost two decades without any Iranian terrorist operations on European soil.
But with the signing of the nuclear deal between the EU and Iran and restoring relations, we are seeing new signs of assassination in the EU and the US. However, this time the operation was attributed to criminal gangs or drug traffickers, which gave the regime the political advantage not to be directly linked to the crime and made them difficult to trace.
We witnessed the murder of an Iranian Arab activist in The Hague in 2017 when the Netherlands subsequently expelled two Iranian diplomats. Relations between the Iranian regime and criminal gangs are detailed in the Dutch press, as have several terrorist plots or bombings foiled by Albanian police in 2018-2019, where a large part of Iran’s democratic opposition was foiled in 2014 after years of repression by the Iraqi government in 2014. Iran’s clerical regime was transferred there. In October 2019, Albanian police submitted a detailed report on an Iranian regime network that recruited criminal gangs in Turkey to attack Iranian dissidents in Albania.
One unsuccessful attack was in Villepinte (near Paris) in June 2018, where an Iranian diplomat had hired several Iranian Belgians to plant the bomb at the annual Iranian opposition meeting in Paris. After ten years of work and continuous preparation, the regime decided to detonate the bomb. This plan failed with the active cooperation of the police and intelligence services of several European countries. The members of the terrorist team were arrested in Belgium and France, and a regime diplomat was arrested in Germany and handed over to Belgium. The Antwerp court sentenced him to 20 years in prison and his accomplices to 17 and 18 years.
We also have recent reports from the UK and the US about criminal gangs attempting to assassinate Iranian and foreign opponents on behalf of the Iranian regime. A recent and famous case was the assassination plot of the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and former national security adviser, John Bolton, who, as the FBI revealed, tried for it to funnel hundreds of thousands of dollars to criminal gangs.
The Iranian Ministry of Intelligence, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the Quds Force are the organizers of this terrorist operation and have the cooperation of all organs of the Iranian government, especially the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the embassies.
A typical feature of the regime in its assassination work is “Operation False Flag”. Every time they do something, they immediately blame their opponents. Even when they failed to attack the 2018 Iranian opposition rally, they immediately claimed that it was an internal conflict, a complete fabrication.
In most of his most recent terrorist crimes, every time a person is arrested, he refuses to speak, saying that if he is released from prison, it will cost him his life. The main elements of the terrorist chain actually recruit professional criminals and tell them that if they reveal the origin of the order, they will be destroyed themselves.
Recent examples of this type of terrorist operation include:
In May and June 2023, a pro-Iranian opposition building north of Paris was the target of shooting and then set on fire. The perpetrators of the crime were all hired professionals who said they could not speak out of fear for their lives.
Also in December 2023, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) representative office in Berlin was attacked by terrorists. The mercenaries threw explosives at the building. Although the investigation into the attack has not yet been made public, the move is undoubtedly similar to those in northern Paris, which indicate a link between the two incidents.
There is one thing in common in all these operations: because the regime is unable to respond politically to its political opponents, it resorts to assassination and killing to silence and intimidate them.
If they had succeeded in killing me, they would have messaged other critics abroad to cease their activities in support of the Iranian Resistance.