Published in Town Hall
By: Alejo Vidal-Quadras | Nov 03, 2024
It was recently revealed that Tánaiste (deputy prime minister) and Foreign Minister Micheál Martin had advised former Taoiseach Leo Varadkar not to sign an open letter in support of the People’s Mojahedin of Iran/Mojahedin-e Khalq (PMOI/MEK) the main democratic opposition movement to the mullahs’ theocratic regime. At first glance, this appeared to be a strange request from the Foreign Minister. Mr. Varadkar had received an email from the ‘In Search of Justice’ (ISJ) organization asking him to sign “an open letter by former world leaders expressing solidarity with the Iranian people’s aspirations for freedom and democracy.” Last November, the Iranian regime attempted to assassinate me outside my home in Madrid. Miraculously, I survived despite being shot in the head. The Spanish police have now arrested 9 suspects associated with the crime, and all indications are that the Iranian regime planned, financed, and outsourced the assassination in an attempt to silence me as president of the ISJ, one of their foremost critics and the person on top of the mullahs’ blacklist.
The attempt on my life follows a pattern of similar terrorist outrages sponsored by the Iranian regime. In 2018, an Iranian diplomat from the regime’s embassy in Vienna, Assadollah Assadi, was arrested after handing a professionally made bomb to three co-conspirators with instructions to detonate it at a major Iranian opposition rally near Paris. The rally was attended by over 100,000 ex-pat Iranians and senior international political figures. Hundreds would have been killed and maimed had the bomb exploded. A Belgian court sentenced Assadi to 20 years imprisonment on terrorist charges.
In response, the mullahs seized a young Belgian charity worker – Olivier Vandecasteele, accusing him of spying and sentencing him to 40 years imprisonment and 74 lashes. Tehran uses the tactic of hostage-taking to negotiate the release of their terrorists, and in this case, the Belgian government, disgracefully, caved in. Assadi returned to a hero’s welcome in Tehran. Indeed, Ireland has also suffered hostage diplomacy at the hands of the mullahs. Bernard Phelan, a 64-year-old Irish/French national originally from Clonmel in Co Tipperary, was sentenced to six and a half years in jail on trumped-up spying charges after being arrested in Mashhad in October 2022. When he became seriously ill in prison, Mr Phelan was released last year, following the intervention of the French government and of Tánaiste Micheál Martin.