24 May 2024,
Dear President,
I write to you on behalf of the international committee In Search of Justice. As you know, our organization is supported by in excess of 4,000 parliamentarians and dignitaries on both sides of the Atlantic. I am sure that we speak for all of them when we say that we were outraged to hear that you had sent condolences on behalf of the EU to the Iranian regime for the death of Ebrahim Raisi – ‘The Butcher of Tehran’ and their foreign minister Abdollahian. We can assure you that you do not speak for us.
You are no doubt well aware of Raisi’s background. As Deputy Prosecutor in Tehran in 1988 he was he was one of four individuals whom the then Supreme Leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, appointed to a ‘death commission’, to carry out his infamous fatwa to massacre supporters of the opposition People’s Mojahedin of Iran/Mojahedine Khalq (PMOI/MEK). During that massacre, 30,000 political prisoners were summarily executed within a few months. For his zeal as a merciless executioner, he was promoted to the position of Tehran Prosecutor in 1989 and held that position for five years. In 2012 he became Deputy Head of the Judiciary and then Judiciary Chief in March 2019, paving his pathway to the presidency as the ultimate, bloodstained hardliner. He has openly boasted about his role in executing tens of thousands of political prisoners, claiming that he should be praised for “defending the security of the people.”
Following the murder in custody by the so-called morality police of the young Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini in 2022, the event that triggered mass nationwide protests, Raisi ordered a savage crackdown by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and the paramilitary Basij, which led to the deaths of more than 750 mostly young demonstrators and over 30,000 arrests. Under Raisi’s watch, many of the detainees have been tortured, raped and executed. He also instructed the morality police to double-down on their patrols and arrests. Raisi was placed on the US Treasury blacklist on 10th November 2019, for serial human rights violations. Since then, as president, he directed the execution of over 2,000 people, many of them young protesters detained during the nationwide uprising in 2022/23. Last year alone, Raisi presided over the hanging of 864 men and women, a 48% increase on 2022.
As president, Raisi also most probably authorised the attempted assassination of myself as president of the ISJ. As you know, I was Vice President of the European Parliament from 1999-2014. On November 9th last year, a hit man attempted to assassinate me as I strolled outside my home in Madrid. I was shot in the face but miraculously survived. It is remarkable and shocking that the EU should now express sympathy with the mullahs’ oppressive regime for the death of this monster.
As president, Raisi oversaw the arming and financing of Bashar alAssad’s brutal civil war in Syria, the Houthi rebels in Yemen, the Shi’ite militias in Iraq, the terrorists Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. Indeed, Raisi helped to plan the deadly Hamas attack on Israel on 7th October which triggered the ongoing war in Gaza. He also oversaw the missile and drone barrage on Israel which ended the shadow war between the two arch enemies and threatened a full-scale regional war.
Raisi was tipped to take over as Supreme Leader from the ailing 85-year-old Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. His untimely end will at least have spared the world from this dreadful fate. As president of a pariah regime that sponsors international terrorism and is guilty of human rights abuse and crimes against humanity domestically, Raisi’s death should be fêted rather than grieved. Western powers must show their support for the Iranian people, rather than their corrupt and merciless oppressors. Your expression of condolences was a further improper and wholly inappropriate gesture of appeasement.
Yours sincerely,
ALEJO VIDAL-QUADRAS
President ISJ
Spanish professor of atomic and nuclear physics
Vice-President of the European Parliament (1999-2014)